Cloud Storage with Red Hat Ceph Storage
- SectionDescribing Storage Personas
- Quiz: Describing Storage Personas
- Describing Red Hat Ceph Storage Architecture
- Guided Exercise: Describing Red Hat Ceph Storage Architecture
- Describing Red Hat Ceph Storage Management Interfaces
- Guided Exercise: Describing Red Hat Ceph Storage Management Interfaces
- Summary
Abstract
| Goal | Describe Red Hat Ceph Storage architecture, including data organization, distribution, and client access methods. |
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After completing this section, you should be able to describe the personas in the cloud storage ecosystem that characterize the use cases and tasks taught in this course.
Personas are user definitions that are created to represent user types in cloud storage environments. Personas help you to understand user scenarios and goals by researching trends and use cases with Red Hat Ceph Storage organizations. Red Hat uses personas to focus training on relevant user tasks and behavior, not on features and tools.
Information from real Red Hat Ceph Storage users builds the various personas. Personas might describe multiple job titles, and your organization's job titles might map to multiple personas. The personas that are presented here embody the most common roles of Red Hat Ceph Storage users. Roles might change depending on your organization's size and user ecosystem. This course uses the storage administrator persona to define Red Hat Ceph Storage operations and use cases.
This course focuses primarily on the roles and responsibilities of the storage administrator persona and introduces the storage operator persona. The storage administrator also supports and communicates with other cloud personas to implement cloud storage.
The primary persona for this course is the storage administrator. A Ceph storage administrator performs the following tasks:
Installs, configures, and maintains a Ceph storage cluster.
Educates infrastructure architects about Ceph capabilities and features.
Informs users about Ceph data presentation and methods, as choices for their data applications.
Provides resilience and recovery, such as replication, backup, and disaster recovery methods.
Automates and integrates through Infrastructure as Code.
Provides access for data analytics and advanced mass data mining.
This course includes material to cover Ceph storage cluster deployment and configuration, and incorporates automation techniques whenever appropriate.
A storage operator assists in the daily operations of the storage cluster, and is commonly less experienced than a storage administrator. Storage operators primarily use the Ceph Dashboard GUI to view and respond to cluster alerts and statistics. They also perform routine storage administration tasks that are defined as Dashboard workflows, such as replacing a failed storage device.
Other personas that use Ceph directly include application developers, project managers, and service administrators with data processing, data warehouse, big data, and similar application needs. The storage administrator frequently communicates with these personas. Defining these relationships helps to illustrate the context for the storage administrator's duties, and clarifies the task limits or boundaries of the storage administrator's scope.
- Cloud Operator
A cloud operator administers cloud resources at their organization, such as OpenStack or OpenShift infrastructures. The storage administrator works closely with a cloud operator to maintain the Ceph cluster that is configured to provide storage for those platforms
- Automation Engineer
Automation engineers frequently use Ceph directly. An automation engineer is responsible for creating playbooks for commonly repeated tasks. All user interface and end-user discussions in this course are examples of actions that might be automated. Storage administrators would be familiar with these same actions because they are typically the foremost Ceph subject matter experts.
- Application Developer (DevOps Developer)
An application developer can be an original coder, maintainer, or other cloud user who is responsible for the correct deployment and behavior of an application. A storage administrator coordinates with the application developer to ensure that storage resources are available, sets quotas, and secures the application storage.
- Service Administrator
Service administrators manage end-user services (as distinct from operating system services). Service administrators have a similar role to project managers, but for an existing production service offering.
- Deployment Engineer (DevOps Engineer)
In larger environments, dedicated personnel perform, manage, and tune application deployments, working with the storage administrator and the application developer.
- Application Architect
A storage administrator relies on the application architect as a subject matter expert who can correlate between Ceph infrastructure layout and resource availability, scaling, and latency. This archicture expertise helps the storage administrator to design complex application deployments effectively. To support the cloud users and their applications, a storage administrator must comprehend those same aspects of resource availability, scaling, and latency.
- Infrastructure Architect
A storage administrator must master the storage cluster's architectural layout to manage resource location, capacity, and latency. The infrastructure architect for the Ceph cluster deployment and maintenance is a primary source of information for the storage administrator. The infrastructure architect might be a cloud service provider employee or a vendor solutions architect or consultant.
- Data Center Operator
Personas at the lower Ceph storage infrastructure layer support data provisioning. Data center operators are typically employed by the public cloud service provider or the organization's internal IT group in a private data center cloud. The storage administrator opens service tickets with the relevant public cloud service provider or internal IT group.
Because staffing, skills, security, and sizing differ between organizations, personas and cloud roles are often implemented differently. Although personas sometimes match individuals, users commonly assume more than one persona depending on their workplace responsibilities.
At telecommunications service providers (telcos) and cloud service providers, the prevalent personas are the cloud and storage operators, infrastructure architects, and cloud service developers. Their customers request support with the provider's service ticketing system. Commonly, customers only consume storage services and do not maintain them.
At organizations that require a secure, private, dedicated infrastructure, such as in banking and finance, all roles are internally staffed. The storage administrator, cloud operator, and infrastructure architect personas act as service providers and support all other personas.
At universities and smaller implementations, technical support personnel can potentially assume all roles. A single individual might handle the storage administrator, infrastructure architect, and cloud operator personas.
