Ceph Community Expands “Geek on Duty”

Last month Inktank launched a community help program that we called “Office Hours” in an attempt to provide specific hours where an engineer would be available to answer questions from the community. These efforts have done a lot for both the ability to answer questions, as well as the ability for our engineers to focus their attention on development while not on duty. Our hope was that the community would jump in and participate in these efforts just like they have done with development efforts. We were not disappointed!

Three different non-Inktank groups have stepped up and volunteered to be resident “super-geeks” and help the community. Since we had such a great response we are relaunching this effort as “Geek on Duty” and tweaking our help page a bit to make it easier for people to get the type of assistance that is most appropriate to their needs.

What it is ¶

While our community is quite active at all hours of the day and night, we know that it is often difficult to gauge when various people may be available due to timezone constraints. Our hope was that by providing office hours people would be able to plan when they would allocate time to wrapping their brains around Ceph.

A number of people have expressed that while they had questions, they often didn’t know how to encapsulate them into an asyncronous communication medium like email and wanted to “talk it out.” Knowing that someone would be available for a conversation has made this a much better experience.

What it isn’t ¶

While having access to a “Geek on Duty” may be very helpful in gaining a rapid understanding of Ceph and standing up your first cluster, it’s important to remember that this is not support. Community help should be considered more along the lines of helpful water cooler chatter since it doesn’t come with guarantees, SLAs, or things of that nature.

Once you have moved into the realm of production deployment (or a pre-production setup getting ready for production) it’s probably worth exploring professional support offerings from places like Inktank. Professional support offers you the peace-of-mind of 24/7 support with SLA assurances and ensures that someone will be at the other end of the phone when you pick up.

Other Resources ¶

While the people involved in helping you to adopt Ceph are absolutely invaluable it’s important not to forget that there are many other resources available to you. The Ceph documentation is becoming quite robust, we just relaunched the Ceph wiki, and Inktank has a wide range of resources available including whitepapers, case studies, presentations, and other Ceph-related information.

Conclusion ¶

I think the bottom line here is that the Ceph community is awesome! There are many different places that you can get help, support, or consulting to ensure your deployment of Ceph is smooth and painless. If you have questions or would like to get more involved with Ceph please don’t hesitate to drop us a line at community@ceph.com. Most importantly we want to thank our community for being awesome, keep up the great work.

scuttlemonkey out