GlusterFS and Ceph are two distributed persistent storage systems. GlusterFS is, at its core, a network filesystem. Ceph is, at the core, an object store. Both expose block, object, and filesystem interfaces. Both use the xfs filesystem under the covers to store data and metadata as xattr attributes. There are several reasons why you may want to use GlusterFS or Ceph as persistent volumes in your Kubernetes cluster:
- You may have a lot of data and applications that access the data in GlusterFS or Ceph
- You have administrative and operational expertise managing GlusterFS
or Ceph - You run in the cloud, but the limitations of the cloud platform persistent storage are a non-starter
