The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) recently announced the graduation of Rook, an open-source cloud-native storage orchestrator for Kubernetes. Rook is the 13th CNCF project, and provides functionality using a Kubernetes Operator for each storage provider.
Initially accepted as a CNCF project in 2018, Rook has grown its contributor base by 260%. Rook is the first project based on block, file, or object storage to graduate. CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk said,
Storage is an important aspect of any cloud native deployment, and Rook fills a gap for teams who historically ran persistent storage outside of cloud native environments. Rook is easy to use and integrates seamlessly with Kubernetes through the operator paradigm, we are excited to see the project graduate and look forward to cultivating their growing community.
Rook transforms traditional storage systems like Ceph and transforms them into cloud-native services that run on top of Kubernetes. Several organizations like Finleap Connect, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, and Geodata are using Rook in production.
The maintainer team of Rook currently consists of seven members. As per CNCF, over the last 12 months, 184 distinct contributors have authored more than 1,140 pull requests.
Rook supports several storage providers, including CockroachDB, Cassandra, NFS, and YugabyteDB. Travis Nielsen, Rook maintainer and senior principal software engineer at Red Hat, stated,
Rook was born from the need for automated storage management in cloud native environments. Rather than plugging external storage solutions into Kubernetes, we recognized that a storage platform was needed within a Kubernetes cluster. We are very proud of this graduation that recognizes the maturity of the project and our dedication to quality, security, and reliability in production!
In December 2019, Rook went through a CNCF security audit, which identified 13 issues ranging in severity from High to Low. The maintainers have taken steps to address these issues.
Sharing the journey so far, Christian Hüning, technical director at Finleap Connect, mentioned,
"We never lost a byte of data even though upgrading through the pre-GA releases and had an exceptional experience with the helpful Rook community. It is running flawless and delivers us the performance and resilience we require for our most critical business applications."
There was an interesting conversation on Hacker News about this announcement. One member fh973 said that "...the heavy lifting is done by Ceph, the name is only mentioned in passing in the 10th paragraph." Other HN members debated whether the CNCF has got a marketing aspect to it. On the same thread, another member, manigandham said, "...Overall good to see more storage options for K8S with others like Longhorn, OpenEBS, StorageOS, Portworx, etc."
CNCF projects have maturity levels, which indicate what type of enterprises should be adopting different projects. Incubating projects need to satisfy specific graduation criteria. Qualifying these criteria, Rook has shown growing adoption, an open governance process, feature maturity, and a strong commitment to community, sustainability, and inclusivity.
