Chapter 1. The Ceph Object Gateway

Ceph Object Gateway, also known as RADOS Gateway (RGW), is an object storage interface built on top of the librados library to provide applications with a RESTful gateway to Ceph storage clusters. Ceph Object Gateway supports three interfaces:

The Ceph Object Gateway is a service interacting with a Ceph storage cluster. Since it provides interfaces compatible with OpenStack Swift and Amazon S3, the Ceph Object Gateway has its own user management system. Ceph Object Gateway can store data in the same Ceph storage cluster used to store data from Ceph block device clients; however, it would involve separate pools and likely a different CRUSH hierarchy. The S3 and Swift APIs share a common namespace, so you can write data with one API and retrieve it with the other.

Administrative API requests are done on a URI that starts with the admin resource end point. Authorization for the administrative API mimics the S3 authorization convention. Some operations require the user to have special administrative capabilities. The response type can be either XML or JSON by specifying the format option in the request, but defaults to the JSON format.