If you’re evaluating how to build or manage your own S3-compatible object storage, you’re not alone. Even major cloud providers like DigitalOcean made that shift — and chose Ceph, one of the most powerful (and complex) open-source storage platforms available.

This wasn’t a decision made lightly. It came after careful technical evaluation and strategic forecasting. Today, Ceph continues to power DigitalOcean’s Spaces service across regions and use cases — and offers lessons for anyone seeking scalable, vendor-neutral storage infrastructure.

In this post, we’ll cover:

• Why DigitalOcean chose Ceph
• What alternatives they evaluated
• Common criticisms of Ceph (and why they still went forward)
• What this trend means for others considering a self-hosted or hybrid S3-compatible solution

A Brief History: DigitalOcean and Ceph

• 2017 – DigitalOcean begins internal work on S3-compatible storage
• 2018 – Spaces launches, built on Ceph’s RADOS Gateway (RGW)
• 2020–2022 – Scaling and performance tuning continues, especially around RGW

This decision marked a clear departure from relying on external vendors. It was a vote of confidence in Ceph’s long-term scalability and openness.

Why Did DigitalOcean Choose Ceph Over Other S3 Storage Engines?

DigitalOcean needed more than just an S3-compatible API. They required a solution that could:

• Scale horizontally to petabytes
• Run reliably on commodity hardware
• Support secure multi-tenant workloads
• Avoid commercial vendor licensing and dependency

Ceph, with its RADOS Gateway (RGW), offered native S3 API compatibility, flexible data placement through CRUSH, and support for object, block, and file storage — all from a unified backend.

What Were the Alternatives?

Before settling on Ceph, DigitalOcean had several options on the table—each with its own trade-offs:

• MinIO offered high performance and simplicity, but lacked erasure-coded multi-node deployments and mature multi-tenancy at the time. Its shift toward open-core also raised concerns around future licensing.
• GlusterFS was viable for distributed file storage, but didn’t natively support the S3 API or scale well for object workloads.
• OpenStack Swift provided object storage, but required a heavyweight OpenStack control plane—unfit for DigitalOcean’s lean architecture.
• Commercial products like Scality RING or Caringo offered mature solutions, but came with licensing costs and vendor dependencies that contradicted DigitalOcean’s open and cost-sensitive approach.
• Building a new object store in-house would have taken years and significant engineering effort—while Ceph already had years of production-grade deployment behind it.

In short, Ceph was the only open-source, scalable, and fully S3-compatible system that aligned with their engineering and business goals. Learn more at https://ceph.io.

Is Ceph Too Complex? Common Criticisms and Realities

One recurring theme in community discussions—especially on Reddit and Hacker News—is Ceph’s complexity:

“You need a full team just to run Ceph.”

“It’s overkill for small to mid-sized deployments.”

These concerns are valid. Ceph is designed for scale, and with that comes architectural complexity: monitoring daemons, proper CRUSH maps, RGW tuning, and hardware considerations.

But this complexity is also what enables Ceph’s flexibility. Like Kubernetes or Terraform, it has a learning curve—but also broad applicability once understood.

Many of the companies adopting Ceph aren’t doing so because it’s easy, but because it gives them control, performance, and cost-efficiency once operationalized properly.

TL;DR: Ceph is complex, but complexity can be managed — and the benefits are long-term.

Ceph Adoption is Becoming Mainstream

DigitalOcean isn’t alone. Ceph is gaining adoption across industries:

• OVH uses Ceph to power both object and block storage
• Civo integrates Ceph into their Kubernetes-native storage stack
• Countless private clouds, SaaS platforms, and enterprise teams now rely on Ceph

Its appeal lies in its open governance, ecosystem maturity, and adaptability across storage workloads.

Final Thoughts: Ceph with Eyes Wide Open

Ceph is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It requires planning, experience, and the right tooling to succeed.

But DigitalOcean’s decision to go with Ceph—and the ecosystem of companies following suit—shows that this complexity is not a blocker. It’s an investment.

For engineering teams evaluating self-hosted or hybrid cloud S3-compatible storage, Ceph remains one of the strongest open-source choices available.

This article was written by the infrastructure team at Kubedo. We specialize in building and managing production-grade Ceph clusters for object storage use cases. Our engineers have helped teams scale Ceph across AI workloads, backup systems, and Kubernetes-native environments.

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