We've had very good success with Ceph for block storage and a fairly rough time with it for object storage. We're currently doing our best to try to improve it (both our own upstream contributions and collaborating with RedHat).
From a technology standpoint, I think it is very interesting and for the most part has a lot of very good engineering. However, it is fairly complex and even today it's very easy to have a hard time with it when starting out. You really need to pay attention to every detail and your hardware selection is extremely important.
It is extremely resilient, and goes to great lengths to preserve your data. Ceph can be performant, however that requires very good hardware and network.
My experience is limited up to the Jewel release (we haven't upgraded to Luminous and we are not planning on using BlueStore anytime soon).
Sage's talk at LCA covered the work they're doing here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrStE7XSKFE
But yes, at small scale Gluster is still a lot easier to deploy and run.
There are options that will perform better, but they are almost always considerably more expensive than FOSS, and all have their own weird scaling quirks.
With the launch of BlueStore a few months ago as well as improvements in erasure coding, I wouldn't hesitate to take a look at it again if I was starting a new project.