On Thursday, November 20, 2025 1:17:57 AM Eastern Standard Time Adrian 
Sevcenco wrote:
> Hi! Is there any possibility to use cephadm without the container based
> tooling?
 (so to use bare-metal, with the packages directly installed on
> the machine) 
> If not, is there something technical that prevents it to happen or just
> that there is a policy that container based deployment is the only best way
> to do it
 therefore cephadm will only use it this way?
> 
> I ask this in the context of finding out that ceph-ansible is deprecated
> and
 that it should not be used, but i still need to use ansible for
> management and i think (so without factual experience) that bare metal
> services would be easier to manage after doing by hand deployment with
> cephadm 
> Thank you!
> Adrian


This question comes up every so often and so I'll repeat the answer that was 
formulated previously in the orch weekly discussion as best as I can remember 
it:

Using containers is one of the fundamental building blocks of cephadm and it 
would be a very large, potentially disruptive, change to alter that. However, 
Ceph already has some level of support of alternative orch backends. Cephadm 
is probably the most often used and it's prominence impacts the shape of the 
API (IMO), but it is possible to add more. One could create a `cephpkgadm` if 
one wanted to.

That said, the majority of the people actively contributing to Cephadm prefer 
the container based approach and are not actively seeking to make this 
alternative happen. If it is something folks want strongly enough they will 
have to contribute the majority of code. Existing orch contributors are 
willing to provide some advice and guidance but can not stop working on 
cephadm and related items to help with this new backend. Common APIs & code 
could be eventually developed and  shared between cephadm and this new back-
end, but a viable prototype would probably need to be demonstrated first.



To also briefly touch on your point WRT ansible: there is already a cephadm-
ansible project (see https://docs.ceph.com/projects/cephadm-ansible/en/latest/
index.html ). Personally, I also drive my VM setups using ansible and cephadm 
together (but I'm just a mere dev and all my clusters are ephemeral :-)).



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