By "k8s-native" I meant solutions that were built from the ground up with k8s in mind. Rook is built on Ceph, and as such requires knowledge and maintenance of both, which seems like much more difficult than managing something like Longhorn.
I think you misunderstood me. I'm not inclined to give Ceph/Rook a try because of its complexity, regardless of the state of its documentation. I was refering to Proxmox in my previous comment, in the sense that I don't need a VM/container manager/orchestrator with a pretty UI. If I'm already running k3s, I can manage the infrastructure via the CLI and IaaC, and removing that one layer of abstraction that Proxmox provides is a positive to me. Which is why adding just a storage backend like Longhorn to a k3s cluster seems like the path of least resistance for my use case.
Ultimately, I don't _want_ to deal with the low-level storage details. If I did, I'd probably be managing RAID, ZFS, or even Ceph. For my current NAS I just use a single JBOD server with SnapRAID and MergerFS. This works great for my use case, but I want to have pseudo-HA and better fault tolerance, and experiment with k8s/k3s in the process.
So I'm looking for a k8s-native tool that I can throw a bunch of nodes and disks at, easily configure it to serve a few volumes, and that it gives me somewhat performant, reliable, and hopefully maintenance-free, block or object-level access. Persistent storage has always been a headache in k8s land, but I'm hoping that nowadays such user friendly and capable solutions exist that will allow me to level up my homelab.
Also, I feel obligated to ask “are you me?” at your stated homelab journey. I also went from mergerfs + SnapRAID, albeit shifting to ZFS. I also went with k3s, but opted for k3os which is now dead and thus leaving me needing to shift again (I’m moving to Talos). Finally, everything in my homelab is also in IaC, with VMs buiit by Packer + Ansible, and deployed with Terraform.
Happy to discuss this more at length if you have any questions; my email is in my profile.
I think you misunderstood me. I'm not inclined to give Ceph/Rook a try because of its complexity, regardless of the state of its documentation. I was refering to Proxmox in my previous comment, in the sense that I don't need a VM/container manager/orchestrator with a pretty UI. If I'm already running k3s, I can manage the infrastructure via the CLI and IaaC, and removing that one layer of abstraction that Proxmox provides is a positive to me. Which is why adding just a storage backend like Longhorn to a k3s cluster seems like the path of least resistance for my use case.
Ultimately, I don't _want_ to deal with the low-level storage details. If I did, I'd probably be managing RAID, ZFS, or even Ceph. For my current NAS I just use a single JBOD server with SnapRAID and MergerFS. This works great for my use case, but I want to have pseudo-HA and better fault tolerance, and experiment with k8s/k3s in the process.
So I'm looking for a k8s-native tool that I can throw a bunch of nodes and disks at, easily configure it to serve a few volumes, and that it gives me somewhat performant, reliable, and hopefully maintenance-free, block or object-level access. Persistent storage has always been a headache in k8s land, but I'm hoping that nowadays such user friendly and capable solutions exist that will allow me to level up my homelab.