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What makes Ceph complicated? The underlying idea and how Ceph works is fairly simple.

This is the "quick installation": http://docs.ceph.com/docs/master/start/

It really shouldn't be this complex. I would love to just be able to boot an executable with a simple config file and be done with it. SeaweedFS shines a light on how this could be improved: https://github.com/chrislusf/seaweedfs

... which naturally brings the question: why choose Ceph and not SeaweedFS ? I've read a bit about the latter (especially the Facebook paper), and the design and operability seem simple enough that it might be a good starting point

Ceph is more production-ready, and has a lot of things SeaweedFS I believe doesn't yet have (such as consistency checking and rebuilding of failed nodes). It also has FS layer capability. SeaweedFS can use a filer but it currently doesn't support indexing (so you can't do subdirectory lookups for example, you would need to know the full filename).

SeaweedFS is fundamentally trying to do a different thing than Ceph is, and it benefits certain use cases. Reading the Facebook Haystack paper will give you an idea of the differences.

That said, I'm extremely impressed with how simple the interface is. It's very easy to get started.

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