To use rbd, you must first connect to RADOS and open an IO context:

cluster = rados.Rados(conffile='my_ceph.conf')
cluster.connect()
ioctx = cluster.open_ioctx('mypool')

Then you instantiate an :class:rbd.RBD object, which you use to create the image:

rbd_inst = rbd.RBD()
size = 4 * 1024**3  # 4 GiB
rbd_inst.create(ioctx, 'myimage', size)

To perform I/O on the image, you instantiate an :class:rbd.Image object:

image = rbd.Image(ioctx, 'myimage')
data = 'foo' * 200
image.write(data, 0)

This writes 'foo' to the first 600 bytes of the image. Note that data cannot be :type:unicode - Librbd does not know how to deal with characters wider than a :c:type:char.

In the end, you’ll close the image, the IO context and the connection to RADOS:

image.close()
ioctx.close()
cluster.shutdown()

To be safe, each of these calls would need to be in a separate :finally block:

cluster = rados.Rados(conffile='my_ceph_conf')
try:
    ioctx = cluster.open_ioctx('my_pool')
    try:
        rbd_inst = rbd.RBD()
        size = 4 * 1024**3  # 4 GiB
        rbd_inst.create(ioctx, 'myimage', size)
        image = rbd.Image(ioctx, 'myimage')
        try:
            data = 'foo' * 200
            image.write(data, 0)
        finally:
            image.close()
    finally:
        ioctx.close()
finally:
    cluster.shutdown()

This can be cumbersome, so the Rados, Ioctx, and Image classes can be used as context managers that close/shutdown automatically. Using them as context managers, the above example becomes:

with rados.Rados(conffile='my_ceph.conf') as cluster:
    with cluster.open_ioctx('mypool') as ioctx:
        rbd_inst = rbd.RBD()
        size = 4 * 1024**3  # 4 GiB
        rbd_inst.create(ioctx, 'myimage', size)
        with rbd.Image(ioctx, 'myimage') as image:
            data = 'foo' * 200
            image.write(data, 0)