Introducing async-ceph, providing async Rust interfaces across Ceph’s RADOS, RBD and CephFS libraries for object, block and file storage.
Stelia has open-sourced async-ceph [1], a new library providing async Rust bindings for Ceph’s RADOS, RBD, and CephFS libraries.
It is the first piece of software developed entirely in-house at Stelia to be released as open source, built to address a gap we encountered while working with two technologies that already play an important role in our systems: Rust and Ceph.
We use Ceph as part of our storage layer, where its distributed architecture and ability to scale make it well suited to demanding AI workloads. Rust has similarly earned its place within our system design where performance, reliability, and low-level control are crucial.
Both are strong foundations in their own right, but using them together presented a practical challenge.
Ceph’s libraries are predominantly written in C and C++, while much of our own engineering uses Rust. Applications written in Rust therefore need a way to interface with Ceph's native libraries. Existing implementations were limited to RADOS and did not expose their functionality through async Rust functions, while we needed async-first bindings and mainly consumed RBD and CephFS APIs.
We built async-ceph to address this gap.
The library provides asynchronous Rust interfaces to those Ceph capabilities, enabling Rust applications to work across Ceph’s object, block, and file storage interfaces.
It is available now as open-source software on GitHub: async-ceph.
Open foundations matter
Much of the modern technology landscape is built on open-source technologies, and Stelia is no exception. The systems we build today are possible because we can draw on decades of engineering work already developed in the open, rather than starting again from first principles.
That cumulative model is part of what makes open source so valuable. One organisation can solve a problem, make that work available, and give others a stronger starting point for whatever they build next.
While we’ve contributed fixes and improvements to open-source projects before, async-ceph marks the first time we’re publishing software developed from the ground up within Stelia: a capability we needed for our own systems, but one that can now be used and developed beyond them.
More broadly, it reflects the role we think open-source should play in our engineering: using established open technologies where they are the right foundations, contributing to the projects we rely on, and making our own work available where it has wider application.
What’s next
async-ceph will continue to be developed in the open as we use and extend it ourselves, and we welcome others in the open-source community to use it and contribute.
It is also just the beginning of more Stelia-developed technology being made available in this way.
Building production-grade AI systems means pushing existing technologies into new environments and, inevitably, finding places where the capability we need doesn’t yet exist. Where we build something to address those gaps and it has value beyond our own systems, we want to continue to make that work available.
Explore async-ceph on GitHub here.
Top comments (0)