Yes people, I’m still alive :). As you might noticed, I’ve been having a hard time to keep up the pace with blogging. It’s mainly due to me traveling a lot these days and preparing conferences. It’s a really busy end of the year for me :).

Fortunately, I’m still finding the time to work on some new features to projects I like. As you might know, I’ve been busy working on ceph-ansible and ceph-docker, trying conciliate both and making sure they work well together. In ceph-docker, we have an interesting container image, that I already presented here. I was recently thinking we could use it to simplify the Ceph bootstrapping process in DevStack. The patch I recently merge doesn’t get ride of the “old” way to bootstrap, the path is just a new addition, a new deployment method.

In practice, this doesn’t change anything for me, but at some point it allows us to validate that a containerized Ceph doesn’t have any problem and bring the same functionality as a non-containerized Ceph. Without further ado, let’s jump into this!

The commit introduces the support of deploying a containerized Ceph cluster. It relies on the ceph/demo container image available as part of the ceph-docker project.

To enable this scenario, just set CEPH_CONTAINERIZED to True in your localrc file. This will install Docker and run the ceph/demo container. Obviously, all the previous available options will work. So settings like CEPH_LOOPBACK_DISK_SIZE continue to work.

One thing to note is that this doesn’t work with the Cinder backup service as we need to change DevStack core, the patch for this is currently under review.

I hope you will find this feature useful as much as I do. Next week, I’ll be heading to OpenStack summit in Barcelona, hope to see you there ;).