Is Ceph similar to Longhorn? I've never used Ceph and would be interested in a comparison
Charles
Oh hey, one of my wheelhouses! I deployed (manually) and manage a 3.2PiB (and growing) Ceph cluster at $dayjob. It's not hard and virtually bulletproof once up, but BOY, that learning curve is a 95 degree incline. The RedHat docs are decent. The upstream docs are... uh. They're not good.
To answer your question directly, they aim to solve very similar problems and have very similar goals. According to the proposal I submitted when evaluating solutions, at least as of August 30, 2021, Longhorn felt VERY MUCH "unfinished" (which makes a lot of sense; it may have SuSE behind it but Ceph has both Red Hat *and* CERN, plus others, contributing both code and other resources).
In short, I chose Ceph over Longhorn because (again, as of a bit over a year ago) it:
- Didn't have the same amount of stability, recovery, and "self-healing" features Ceph does (did)
- Didn't have native Linux kernel support like Ceph
-- And no feasible/practical Windows block client support ($dayjob is mixed-platform)
- Just didn't have the same amount of third-party integrations Ceph did/does
Now, HOPEFULLY most if not all of those are no longer true and Longhorn has matured. But I definitely wasn't confident in deploying it to prod back then.