Production Ready Ceph Object Storage Cluster

A Ceph implementation for object storage (amazon s3 compatible)

Components Used

Name:Version	Documentation	Purpose	Alternatives	Advantages
Terraform 1.5.4	Docs	Hardware Provisioner Initial Setup	Salt Ansible	1. Easy syntax 2. Sufficient community and documentation 3. Much better suited for hardware provisioning
Hetzner Provider 1.42.1	Docs	Deploying servers	Vultr DigitalOcean	1. Cheaper :) 2. Good community overlooking provider
Ansible 2.15.2	Docs	Automating Tasks	Salt	1. No footprint on target hosts
Ubuntu 22.04	Docs	Operating system	Debian Centos	1. Bigger community 2. Faster releases than debian 3. Bigger community than any other OS 4. Not cash grapping like centos (Yet :))
Victoriametrics latest	Docs	Time-series Database	InfluxDB Prometheus	1. High performance 2. Cost-effective 3. Scalable 4. Handles massive volumes of data 5. Good community and documentation
vmalert latest	Docs	Evaluating Alerting Rules	Prometheus Alertmanager	1. Works well with VictoriaMetrics 2. Supports different datasource types
vmagent latest	Docs	Collecting Time-series Data	Prometheus	1. Works well with VictoriaMetrics 2. Supports different data source types
Alertmanager latest	Docs	Handling Alerts	ElastAlert Grafana Alerts	1. Handles alerts from multiple client applications 2. Deduplicates, groups, and routes alerts 3. Can be plugged to multiple endpoints (Slack, Email, Telegram, Squadcast, ...)
Grafana latest	Docs	Monitoring and Observability	Prometheus Datadog New Relic	1. Create, explore, and share dashboards with ease 2.Huge community and documentation 3. Easy to setup and manage 4. Many out of the box solutions for visualization
Nodeexporter latest	Docs	Hardware and OS Metrics	cAdvisor Collectd	1. Measure various machine resources 2. Pluggable metric collectors 3. Basic standard for node monitoing
Cephexporter latest	Docs	Monitoring Ceph Clusters	NoN I Know of	1. Works well with Ceph 2. Exposes Ceph metrics to Prometheus
Docker latest	Docs	Application Deployment and Management	containerd podman	1. Much more bells and wistels are included out of the box comparing to alternatives 2. Awsome community and documentation 3. Easy to work with

Before you begin

Note Each ansible role has a general and a specific Readme file. It is encouraged to read them before firing off

p.s: Start with the readme file of main setup playbook

• Create an Api on hetzner
• Create a server as terraform and ansible provisioner (Needless to say that ansible and terraform must be installed)
• Clone the project
• In modular_terraform folder create a terraform.tfvars
  • The file must contain the following variables
    • hcloud_token "APIKEY"
    • image_name = "ubuntu-22.04"
    • server_type = "cpx31"
    • location = "hel1"
• Run terraform init to create the required lock file
• Before firing off, run terraform plan to see if everything is alright
• Run terraform apply
• Go Drink a cup of coffe and come back in 10 minutes or so (Hopefully everything must be up and running by then (: )

Known issues

• RGW IPs are not set on the domain automatically
• No custom dashboards
• No automation for scaling or maintenance
• No audit logging (to see when,who made what changes on the cluster)
• Terraform is limited to Hetzner
• Since there is no specific range for servers, public-network of mon, in on 0.0.0.0/0
  • Firewall policies minimize the risk
• Grafana datasource must be set manually http://IP_ADDRESS_:8428

Work flow

• Run the following command for terraform to install dependencies and create the lock file

terraform init

• Run the following command and check if there are any problems with terraform

terraform plan

• Apply terraform modules and get started

terraform apply

• Check the storage capacity on OSDs

ceph -s
ceph orch host ls
ceph df

• Check if Mons are in quorum

ceph mon stat

• Check if Victoria_Metrics and Vmagent work

• Note

Check if all targets are scraped properly

• Check if vmalert works

• Note

Check if alerts are gouped properly

• Check if Grafana works

• Note

All dashboard are provisioned To add custom dashbaord on load, add it to /Ansible/roles/Victoria_Metrics/files/Grafana/provisioning/dashboards as a .json file. It would automatically be loaded to Grafana Just keep in mind that you have to also copy the dashbaord using ansible to the remote destination

• Check if Alert manager is working

• Note

Created some alerts to demonstrate The alerts are being routed to Slack/Gmail

• Creating a bucket

s3cmd --config=s3cfg mb s3://bucket

• Upload objects

s3cmd --config=scfg put 1G.bin s3://bucket

• To Clean up everything (including the nodes themselvs)

terraform destroy