Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Beyond Balancing: How Upmaps Were Used To Avoid Disaster! - Bryan Stillwell, Akamai Technologies
Upmaps are great for nudging a few PGs around to distribute data evenly across your Ceph cluster, but what if I told you they could also save your cluster from a meltdown caused by a sleeping hardware issue that only shows up after a reboot?
In this talk, I’ll walk through a real-world example where a hardware flaw across thousands of Ceph servers (spanning multiple clusters) created a ticking time bomb. I’ll show how we used upmaps to avert disaster and keep things running smoothly. I’ll also share other clever (and maybe unexpected) uses for upmaps that could make your life as a Ceph admin a little easier, and a lot less terrifying!
Beyond Balancing: How Upmaps Were Used To Avoid Disaster! - Bryan Stillwell, Akamai Technologies
Upmaps are great for nudging a few PGs around to distribute data evenly across your Ceph cluster, but what if I told you they could also save your cluster from a meltdown caused by a sleeping hardware issue that only shows up after a reboot?
In this talk, I’ll walk through a real-world example where a hardware flaw across thousands of Ceph servers (spanning multiple clusters) created a ticking time bomb. I’ll show how we used upmaps to avert disaster and keep things running smoothly. I’ll also share other clever (and maybe unexpected) uses for upmaps that could make your life as a Ceph admin a little easier, and a lot less terrifying!
