For a production environment, it's recommended that you configure the RGW on a physical, dedicated machine. However, if your object storage workload is not too much, you can consider using any of the monitor machines as an RGW node. The RGW is a separate service that externally connects to a Ceph cluster and provides object storage access to its clients. In a production environment, it's recommended that you run more than one instance of the RGW, masked by a Load Balancer, as shown in the following diagram:
![](https://static.packt-cdn.com/products/9781788391061/graphics/assets/37e5526c-3b53-4772-8da8-6bd1038b3348.png)
Starting with the Firefly release of Ceph, a new RGW frontend had been introduced: Civetweb, which is a lightweight standalone web server. Civetweb has been embedded directly into the ceph-radosgw service, making the Ceph object storage service deployment quicker and easier.
In the following recipes...