[YorickPeterse]

> They probably could have saved themselves a lot of pain by talking to some Ceph experts still working inside RedHat for architectural and other design decisions.

We have been in contact with RedHat and various other Ceph experts ever since we started using it.

> I agree with other poster who asked why do they even need a gigantic distributed fs and how that seems like a design miss.

Users can self host GitLab. Using some complex custom block storage system would complicate this too much, especially since the vast majority of users won't need it.