This post reminded me of a very old article from Yahoo/Tumblr explaining how they were (ab)using Ceph to generate thumbnails on the fly as pictures were uploaded using the Ceph OSD plugin interface.

Unfortunately the post seems to have disappeared from the internet (it was probably around 6 years ago), so here are some other teasers:

https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/116391291701/yahoo-cloud-ob...

https://ceph.com/geen-categorie/dynamic-object-interfaces-wi...

Disclaimer: not affiliated with Ceph apart from being a happy sysadmin.