Apache Karaf with OSGi works pretty nice using annotation based dependency injection with the declarative services, removing the need to mess with those hopefully archaic XML blueprints. Too bad it's not as trendy as spring and the developers so many of the tutorials can be a bit dated and hard to find. Karaf also supports many other frameworks and programming models as well and there's even Red Hat supported... Source: about 3 years ago

I have some experience with Ceph, both for work, and with homelab-y stuff. First, bear in mind that Ceph is a distributed storage system - so the idea is that you will have multiple nodes. For learning, you can definitely virtualise it all on a single box - but you'll have a better time with discrete physical machines. Also, Ceph does prefer physical access to disks (similar to ZFS). And you do need decent... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago

Another option is to leverage a Kubernetes-native distributed storage solution such as Rook Ceph as the storage backend for stateful components running on Kubernetes. This has the benefit of simplifying application configuration while addressing business requirements for data backup and recovery such as the ability to take volume snapshots at a regular interval and perform application-level data recovery in case... - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago

This is beyond your question but might help someone else: I switch from docker-compose to kubernetes for my home lab a while ago. The storage solution I've settled on is Rook. It was a bit of up-front work learning how to get it up but now that it's done my storage is automatically managed by Ceph. I can swap out drives and Ceph basically takes care of everything itself. Source: 12 months ago

The stumbling point I am at is I want to use rook.io(Ceph) as my storage solution for the cluster. The Ceph prerequisites are one of the following:. Source: about 1 year ago

Storage: Favor any distributed storage you know to start with for Persistent Volumes: Ceph maybe via rook.io, Longhorn if you go rancher etc. Source: over 1 year ago