Become a Ceph specialist with our course

Become a Ceph specialist with our course

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A lot of organisations have adopted and embraced the opportunities of native cloud storage with Ceph. Either with or without OpenStack. One of the hallmarks of Ceph is that a well-trained Linux team (or a single engineer) can setup a Ceph cluster pretty easily. But as the success in the organization of this platform often grows rapidly, eventually questions and challenges arise that the team cannot resolve themselves anymore. Of course we at 42on can answer a lot of these questions, but we can do better than that: By training you or your team to become Ceph specialist.

 

Ceph is the storage solution that provides applications with object, block, and file system storage. All in a single unified storage cluster. It is flexible, highly reliable and easy to manage. Ceph storage is scalable for thousands of client hosts accessing petabytes of data. Applications can use any of the system interfaces to the same cluster simultaneously, which means your Ceph storage system serves as a flexible foundation for all of your data storage needs. Ceph is designed and built with data consistency as its number one priority. By default Ceph stores all data in 3 replica’s. Read more about Ceph in my earlier blogs on Object, block and file storage and this follow up. It can become complex Ceph is nearly unbreakable when setup correctly. The more Ceph grows (i.e. more physical machines are added), the more the architectural decisions, become important. And that can be overwhelming sometimes. Because you do not want to make a mistake when it comes with your data. Loosing just one bit is a no-go.

 

That is why Fairbanks provides Ceph trainings, so that the experts can rest assured they know how to design, expand and maintain their storage infrastructure. In our training courses, we focus on the inner workings of Ceph, so our trainees are able to safely operate and maintain any Ceph deployment, regardless of the orchestration technology used. We offer two types of training. Our ‘Ceph basic training’ program is aimed at Ceph admins for high quality day-to-day operations. If you feel that the ‘basic’ training topics are not advanced enough for your team’s needs, it is also possible to attend an additional advanced training program were we offer custom topics, for example a FileStore to BlueStore migration ‘how to’, or any additional topics as requested or needed. Our very experienced trainees will definitely share their stories from the trenches how to optimize or troubleshoot any Ceph environment.

 

What does a training look like?

At least 6 times a year we organize the two-day hands-on course, right here at our office in Baarn, near Schiphol Airport and the center of The Netherlands. We chose to do it here, so that trainees can fully immerse themselves in the training, without the distractions of their daily job. So, cell phones turned off when in class. Rather than one of our trainers standing in front of the group talking for hours and hours, trainees will actively be working on LAB exercises on the virtual machines we provide. To make sure that we can help everybody attending, we keep the classes small, with eight people maximum. The training is always based on the latest version of Ceph, which is currently Nautilus, or Ceph v14.2.0 and was released in March of 2019.

 

In the two days, trainees will learn how Ceph differs from other storage systems, how Ceph works internally and identify and understand the different components. This is crucial for knowing how to maintain the system. And yes, that means our trainer will stand in front of the class and explain. But believe us – and former trainees for that matter – when we say it is necessary and useful. After that, you will get to work on Ceph yourself. You will learn how to create and deploy a Ceph cluster (both via Ceph-deploy and via Ansible deploy), you will work with the different components of the Ceph system, such as the Monitor, Management and the Object Storage Daemon (OSD). Of course, RADOS and CRUSH will also be part of the course, as will the Ceph Block Device (RBD).

 

After the two days, we know from experiences that trainees will have a better understanding of Ceph and how to work with it. And of course, if there are still questions, we are ready and more than happy to help you. The training is open to everybody that runs or wants to start operating Ceph as their storage solution. When you have questions about the training or when you would like to attend one of the next Ceph trainings, please let me know.

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