Ceph: Designing and Implementing Scalable Storage Systems

Ceph authentication

To access the Ceph cluster, an actor/user/application invokes the Ceph client to contact the cluster's monitor node. Usually, a Ceph cluster has more than one monitor, and a Ceph client can connect to any monitor node to initiate the authentication process. This multimonitor architecture of Ceph removes a single point of failure situation during the authentication process.

To use Cephx, an administrator, that is, client.admin, must create a user account on the Ceph cluster. To create a user account, the client.admin user invokes the ceph auth get-or-create key command. The Ceph authentication subsystem generates a username and a secret key, stores this information on the Ceph monitor, and returns the user's secret key ...