For around twenty years, Nick Fisk believed that one day he would find a letter on his doormat from Cardiff City FC requesting his services on the football pitch. When he realised it was unlikely he was ever going to be offered the role of groundsman, he decided the next best thing would be to write about the club instead. A former member of the not especially notorious non-hooligan gang, The Sad Crew, Fisk has plenty of experience to draw from, in terms of going to football matches, and coming up with ridiculous chants that nobody ever joins in with. In The Blues Are Back in Town Nick charts the 2014/15 season, following the team and its fans, and trying to rediscover his passion for the recently relegated club, while at the same time, reflecting on the good old days. The blog he kept, The Fisk Report, gave an insight into not just what it's like to be a typical fan, but what supporting The Bluebirds is like through the eyes of a Fisk. It is a funny, enigmatic and personal book about the passion and belief of being a football fan.

Discover the unified, distributed storage system and improve the performance of applications Key Features Explore the latest features of Ceph's Mimic release Get to grips with advanced disaster and recovery practices for your storage Harness the power of Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store (RADOS) to help you optimize storage systems Book DescriptionCeph is an open source distributed storage system that is scalable to Exabyte deployments. This second edition of Mastering Ceph takes you a step closer to becoming an expert on Ceph. You'll get started by understanding the design goals and planning steps that should be undertaken to ensure successful deployments. In the next sections, you'll be guided through setting up and deploying the Ceph cluster with the help of orchestration tools. This will allow you to witness Ceph's scalability, erasure coding (data protective) mechanism, and automated data backup features on multiple servers. You'll then discover more about the key areas of Ceph including BlueStore, erasure coding and cache tiering with the help of examples. Next, you'll also learn some of the ways to export Ceph into non-native environments and understand some of the pitfalls that you may encounter. The book features a section on tuning that will take you through the process of optimizing both Ceph and its supporting infrastructure. You'll also learn to develop applications, which use Librados and distributed computations with shared object classes. Toward the concluding chapters, you'll learn to troubleshoot issues and handle various scenarios where Ceph is not likely to recover on its own. By the end of this book, you'll be able to master storage management with Ceph and generate solutions for managing your infrastructure. What you will learn Plan, design and deploy a Ceph cluster Get well-versed with different features and storage methods Carry out regular maintenance and daily operations with ease Tune Ceph for improved ROI and performance Recover Ceph from a range of issues Upgrade clusters to BlueStore Who this book is forIf you are a storage professional, system administrator, or cloud engineer looking for guidance on building powerful storage solutions for your cloud and on-premise infrastructure, this book is for you.

Deep dive into the unified, distributed storage system in order to provide excellent performance About This Book * Leverage Ceph's advanced features such as erasure coding, tiering, and Bluestore * Solve large-scale problems with Ceph as a tool by understanding its strengths and weaknesses to develop the best solutions * A practical guide that covers engaging use cases to help you use advanced features of Ceph effectively Who This Book Is For If you are a developer and an administrator who has deployed a Ceph cluster before and are curious about some of the most advanced features in order to improve performance then this book is for you What You Will Learn *Know when and how to use some of Ceph's advanced new features * Set up a test cluster with Ansible and some virtual machines using VirtualBox and Vagrant *Develop novel solutions to massive problems with librados and shared object classes. * Choose intelligent parameters for an erasure coded pool and set it up. * Configure the Bluestore settings and see how they interact with different hardware configurations. * Keep Ceph running through thick and thin with tuning, monitoring and disaster recovery advice. In Detail Mastering Ceph covers all that you need to know to use Ceph effectively. Starting with design goals and planning steps that should be undertaken to ensure successful deployments, you will be guided through to setting up and deploying the Ceph cluster, with the help of orchestration tools. Key areas of Ceph including Bluestore, Erasure coding and cache tiering will be covered with help of examples. Development of applications which use Librados and Distributed computations with shared object classes are also covered. A section on tuning will take you through the process of optimisizing both Ceph and its supporting infrastructure. Finally, you will learn to troubleshoot issues and handle various scenarios where Ceph is likely not to recover on its own. By the end of the book, you will be able to successfully deploy and operate a resilient high performance Ceph cluster. Style and approach A practical guide which has each chapter explaining the concept, sharing tips and tricks and a use case to implement the most powerful features of Ceph