Ceph is a distributed file system that provides excellent performance, reliability and scalability for IaaS platforms like OpenStack. It uses an object-based storage model with dynamic distributed metadata management and reliable replication to store data across multiple servers. While CephFS for POSIX file access is still maturing, Ceph block storage via RBD is stable and commonly used in IaaS to provide block-level volumes to VMs from images stored in Ceph.