Anyone who’s ever deployed Ceph presumably knows about ceph-deploy. It’s right there in the Deployment chapter of the upstream docs, and it’s pretty easy to use to get a toy test cluster up and running. For any decent sized cluster though, ceph-deploy rapidly becomes cumbersome… As just one example, do you really want to have to `ceph-deploy osd prepare` every disk? For larger production clusters it’s almost certainly better to use a fully-fledged configuration management tool, such as Salt, which is what this post is about.

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