# Ceph

49 Hacker News commenters recommended Ceph and 23 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Open-source distributed storage that scales across many nodes and holds up well when set up correctly, though it is complex to run.

## Why people recommend it

- Battle-tested and reliable storage (5 comments): "It's been pretty bulletproof; took some time to set up and familiarize with Ceph but now it's simple to operate." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009702)) "My cluster went from 6 to 7, 7 to 8 and recently 8 to 9, along with Ceph - all without a single problem." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45985637)) "Ceph's storage and consensus layer is battle-tested and a much more solid foundation for serious use" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47001185))
- Scales to petabytes and many nodes (6 comments): "What's neat is that ceph allows expanding clusters, just throw more storage servers at it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47000615)) "Ceph scales great if you have loads of large files where you're read/writing in parallel." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48112478)) "We have some clusters spanning 20 racks in a network fabric that has over 100 racks." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47001961))
- Community-governed, multi-company open source (2 comments): "Community-governed projects under foundations (Ceph under Linux Foundation, for example) tend to be more durable" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47000643)) "it is a truly collaborative open source project developed by multiple companies with a long track record" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47011929))
- Open-source S3 and block storage (4 comments): "the only properly engineered open source choices are Ceph + radosgw (single-region, though)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46153519)) "but with that complexity you get much cheaper S3, block storage, and cephfs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644016)) "Ceph solves the distributed consistent block storage problem very well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47004774))

## What people warn about

- Complex to set up and operate (6 comments): "Very complex to manage, though, but that might just be necessary complexity for a distributed storage system." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49716994)) "It's a bit painful to set up and operate, but it seems to work pretty well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49873031)) "Ceph is pretty annoying to operate but if you do, it works fine." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926638))
- Heavy resource and hardware requirements (3 comments): "Ceph is awesome for software defined storage where you have multiple storage nodes and multiple storage devices on each. It's way too heavy and resource intensive for a single machine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46136734)) "Ceph is quite expensive in terms of resource usage, but it is robust and battle-tested." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46159339)) "ceph can do all that but setup is more complex and RAM requirements far, far higher" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137753))
- Limits with many volumes or shared filesystems (3 comments): "we built our own storage system rather than relying on Ceph. The reason is scalability to many volumes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48935759)) "Ceph is a non-starter for me because you cannot have an existing filesystem on the disk." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47002897)) "I do not recommend ceph unless you are okay with not using shared filesystems" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337671))
- Reliability suffers when misconfigured (2 comments): "Ceph clusters when mistreated can get into death spirals that only an experienced practitioner can avert" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46333801)) "many of those at the very cheap end pretty much just ran a Ceph/RADOS cluster and then wondered why they were having lots of problems with reliability" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926656))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [JuiceFS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/juicefs.md): 15 recommend
- [Longhorn](https://hackerapproved.com/p/longhorn.md): 8 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Ceph", https://hackerapproved.com/p/ceph/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).