Ceph is a very finicky beast and I'd advise anyone to stay away unless you're wiling to dedicate significant resources to master it. I've seen more than one Cep

Ceph is a very finicky beast and I'd advise anyone to stay away unless you're wiling to dedicate significant resources to master it. I've seen more than one Ceph system gone belly up during my days at IBM. IBM is throwing significant resources at it have people and procedures developed to tackle the usual and less usual operations... and it still caused headaches. It will make you hate your job whether there's some kind of networking problem (configuration, bad NIC or just plain ol' Softlayer dropping packets while support claiming no problems), some kind of HW problem (one bad OSD node in semi failed state will pretty much kill cluster throughput) or just some bad disks causing it to rebalance in the middle of high I/O time. It always made me nervous even with the most basic 'let's swap the failed OSD' operations. The blog post itself is a classic showcase of putting all eggs in one basket. They'd be better off with a simpler setup. Btw running only 1 monitor node will make you cry when the single monitor decides to take a break which will happen sooner or later.