Rook joins the CNCF
Today we’re excited to announce that Rook has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Members of the the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted Rook in as an inception level project and the first project in the cloud-native storage category. Rook marks an important step towards running more data-intensive workloads on top of cloud-native environments.
Rook was open sourced a little over a year ago and what a year it’s been! We are extremely grateful to the amazing community building around Rook. With the stewardship of the CNCF, we are looking forward to continued growth.
In this post, we will provide a brief overview of Rook and its relationship to the CNCF.
Rook Overview
Most deployments of Kubernetes today rely on external storage systems for persistent storage whether its Block, File or Object storage. In public cloud deployments, that typically means using managed services like EBS, S3 and EFS. On-premise deployments rely on storage systems like NFS or traditional-IT storage solutions and hardware.
Rook brings File, Block and Object storage systems into the Kubernetes cluster, running them seamlessly alongside other applications and services that are consuming the storage. By doing so, the cloud-native cluster becomes self-sufficient and portable across public cloud and on-premise deployments.
Instead of building an entirely new storage system which requires many years to mature, Rook focuses on turning existing battle-tested storage systems like Ceph into cloud-native services that run seamlessly on-top of Kubernetes.
Rook does this by automating tasks that are typically handled by dedicated storage administrators like bootstrapping, configuration, provisioning, scaling, upgrading, migration, disaster recovery, monitoring, and resource management.
Rook integrates deeply into Kubernetes providing a seamless experience for security, policies, quotas, lifecycle management, and resource management. It extends the Kubernetes API and is implemented as a controller for storage.
Vibrant Open Source Community
In a little over a year since Rook’s inception and with the help of our growing community, Rook has been making great strides towards becoming a stable and dependable solution for cloud-native storage. The feedback, experiences and contributions that are being shared with us from the community have been incredible. Let’s take a quick look at some stats that demonstrate how far the community has come in the first year of Rook:
- 1940+ stars on Github
- 1475+ commits
- 180+ forks
- 45+ contributors
- 1.25M+ container pulls
- 225+ Slack members
Community support for Rook is growing rapidly as companies and users are deploying Rook in their cloud-native environments (on-premise and public cloud). Companies and organizations like HBO, UCSD, Norwegian Welfare, Verne Global, FlexShopper, and Acaleph have implemented Rook as part of their storage platforms.
In addition, the Ceph and RedHat Team have recently joined Rook as contributors, and will be adding improved support for OpenShift as well as more alignment between Rook and upstream Ceph.
Rook and the CNCF
Rook is well-aligned with the CNCF’s goals and mission of transitioning the industry to cloud-native computing. Rook brings storage services as a set of first class services running alongside other cloud-native services. We believe that by running storage systems on-top of cloud-native environments we will be a step closer to a truly portable infrastructure and the ability to run multi-cloud.
The CNCF provides Rook with a neutral home for collaboration, and hopefully encourages more growth in the community for Rook. We are excited to work alongside other CNCF projects to push forward the cloud-native mission.
A big thank you to all the supporters of Rook over the years, and to Quantum and Upbound for sponsoring the project thus far. We would also like to thank Ben Hindman of Mesosphere for sponsoring Rook’s submission to the CNCF.
Join Our Growing Community
Are you passionate about storage and cloud-native computing? The Rook community continues to grow and we couldn’t be happier with the contributions and feedback we are getting. We are listening to everything you all are saying and we’ve been incorporating your requests and fixing your pain points. But there’s always room for more folks in our community! There are many opportunities to engage as you can see in the list below:
You can even talk with us directly in our bi-weekly public meetings, held every other Monday at 9AM PST on Zoom.
