The Upstream Documentation Team is writing a Beginner's Guide. If you're reading this email, then you are invited to contribute to it. I have a firm idea of what I want the Beginner's Guide to contain, but it is important to me to consult the Ceph community during the early stages of the composition of the Beginner's Guide, to make sure that we create a Beginner's Guide that is useful. The first section of the Beginner's Guide will be a brief overview of the components of a Ceph cluster. This section will be brief enough to be read in just a couple of minutes. The second section of the Beginner's Guide will be a set of reference architectures. This section will describe the differences between the different kinds of clusters. For example, a CephFS cluster requires Monitors, Managers, OSDs, and also Metadata Servers. An object storage cluster requires Monitors, Managers, OSDs, and a RADOS Gateway. The second section of the Beginner's Guide will describe the various kinds of storage clusters and the pieces that each of the kinds requires. After reading this section, a beginner will know for example which kind of cluster requires a metadata server (it's a CephFS cluster). I am considering writing a third section of the Beginner's Guide that addresses early misconceptions about Ceph. This section would consist of things that people wish they had known when they started using Ceph. The User+Dev Monthly Meetup of November 2023 generated a beefy list of these things, and here are some of them: different storage types (block, file, object) are all built on RADOS, but they don't interact with each other--you can't treat your S3 bucket the way you treat a CephFS directory; there is a difference between a RADOS object and an S3 object. This section would also answer some Ceph-beginner questions: just what is the CRUSH map and what does it do?; which components of a Ceph cluster can run in VMs and which must run on bare metal?; what is the difference between consumer grade hardware and enterprise grade hardware? I expect to have finished writing the Beginner's Guide by Cephalocon 2024. Please tell me if there is something that you'd like to see in a Ceph Beginner's Guide that I haven't mentioned. Zac Dover Upstream DocumentationCeph Foundation