Some use cases might require to zap a device (destroy partition tables) prior to run your Ceph OSD container with a dedicated disk. While running development environment this is particularly interesting as this allows us to quickly bootstrap and tear down sandboxes.

The container will be ephemeral, meaning it will exit as soon as the zap command is done. Calling this container is pretty straightforward, example with a /dev/sdd device:

$ docker run -d --privileged=true -v /dev/:/dev/ -e OSD_DEVICE=/dev/sdd ceph/daemon zap_device

This feature is also part of ceph-ansible while deploying a containerized Ceph cluster.