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alberth

Ceph has an interesting history.

It was created at Dreamhost (DH), for their internal needs by the founders.

DH was doing effectively IaaS & PaaS before those were industry coined words (VPS, managed OS/database/app-servers).

They spun Ceph off and Redhat bought it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DreamHost

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Yeah, as a customer (still one) I remember their "Hey, we're going to build this Ceph thing, maybe it ends up being cool" blog entry (or newsletter?) kinda just sharing what they were toying with. It was a time of no marketing copy and not crafting every sentence to sell you things.

I think it was the university project of one of the founders, and the others jumped in supporting it. Docker has a similar origins story as far as I know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sage_Weil right?

https://ceph.com/assets/pdfs/weil-crush-sc06.pdf

A bit more to the story is that it was created also at UC Santa Cruz, by Sage Weil, a Dreamhost founder, while he was doing graduate work there. UCSC has had a lot of good storage research.

I remember the first time I deployed ceph, would have been around 2010 or 2011, had some really major issues which would nearly resulted in data loss and due to someone else not realizing what "this cluster is experimental, do not store any important data here" meant, the data on ceph was the only copy of the irreplaceable data in the world, loosing the data would have been fairly catastrophic for us.

I ended up on the ceph IRC channel and eventually had Sage helping me fix the issues directly, helping me find bugs and writing patches to fix them in realtime.

Super amazingly nice guy that he was willing to help, never once chastised me for being so stupid (even though I was), also wicked smart.

Sage is one of the nicest, down to earth, super smart individuals I've met.

I've talked to him at a few OpenStack and Ceph conferences, and he's always very patient answering questions.

the fighting banana slugs

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