Great post. We (Koor) have been going through something similar to create a demo environment for Rook-Ceph. In our case, we want to show different types of data storage (block, object, file) in a production-like system, albeit at the smaller end of scale.

Our system is hosted at Hetzner on Ubuntu. KubeOne does the provisioning, backed by Terraform. We are using Calico for networking, and we have our own Rook operator.

What would have made the Rook-Ceph experience better for you?