We run Kafka with kubernetes, but its so locked down/customized we might as well run it on bare metal. We started out on rook network storage, but after multiple fs corruption incidents, we now run every broker with local storage. Kube still gives us the benefit of re-using our deployment software and many monitoring conventions, so we do get some benefit from kubernetes.

The only reason we did not lose data on the rook setup, is we run 5 brokers with replication factor 4, with 2 in sync.