The speaker gives an overview of CEPH, a reliable autonomous distributed object store, and focuses on the Rados Gateway (RGW) component, which enables object storage and provides S3 and Swift protocol capabilities. The speaker describes the Zipper project, a plug-in model for RGW that allows developers to use their own back-end storage, such as databases or other storage systems, for S3 or Swift object storage. The speaker also discusses ongoing work on the project, including different plug-ins and a Lua scripting layer.