The "ceph-container" GitHub project started as an experiment to containerize Ceph and make it integrate with Kubernetes. It has met this goal. I'm opening this ticket to propose how to containerize Ceph in the future.

Years ago, ceph-container provided a lot of extra experimental code (the different "flavors" like "ceph demo", the "sree" app, confd stuff, etc) and supported a wide variety of operating systems (Ubuntu, CentOS, Alpine, etc). Neither of these things are true today. Guillaume has simplified the code now so that it is almost a simple Dockerfile and entrypoint script. We also only publish Ceph images with a single OS (CentOS 8 Stream), greatly simplifying QE effort.

The templating system introduced in 2018 does not provide value today.

I suggest that we have a single Dockerfile at the root of https://github.com/ceph/ceph that will be "the" Ceph container image. (see ceph/ceph#43292). Users who deploy Ceph with cephadm or Rook will use those stable sets of images. This ceph-container GitHub repository will no longer host the Dockerfile for that.

There are a few people in the Ceph community who have discussed maintaining Ubuntu- or Debian-based container images. To provide a common place for these, I suggest renaming this GitHub repo from ceph-container to ceph-containers or alt-containers, and rewrite the README to explain that this is now the location for the non-official or "alternative" container images. You could store simple, untemplated Dockerfiles within subdirectories like ubuntu, debian, etc.