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On Dec 2, 2013, at 5:19 AM, Christian Schwede <christian.schwede at enovance.com> wrote:

> I'd like to discuss a way to increase the partition power of an existing
> Swift cluster.

Achieving this transparently is part of the ongoing plans, starting with things like the DiskFile refactoring and SSync. The idea is to isolate the direct disk access from other servers/tools, something that (for instance) RSync has today. Once the isolation is there, it should be fairly straightforward to have incoming requests for a ring^20 partition look on the local disk in a directory structure that was originally created for a ring^19 partition, or even vice versa. Then, there will be no need to move data around just for a ring-doubling or halving, and no down time to do so.

That said, if you want create a tool that allows such ring shifting in the interim, it should work with smaller clusters that don't mind downtime. I would prefer that it not become a core tool checked directly into swift/python-swiftclient, just because of the plans stated above that should one day make it obsolete.