Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces Rook Graduation

Cloud native storage tool has grown its contributor base by 260% since joining CNCF

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the graduation of Rook. To move from the maturity level of incubation to graduation Rook has demonstrated growing adoption, an open governance process, feature maturity, and a strong commitment to community, sustainability, and inclusivity.

Rook is an open source cloud native storage orchestrator for Kubernetes, providing the platform, framework, and support for a diverse set of storage solutions to natively integrate with cloud native environments. Rook delivers its services via a Kubernetes Operator for each storage provider. It was originally accepted as a CNCF project in 2018. It is the thirteenth CNCF project, and the first project based on block, file, or object storage, to graduate.

“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,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO/COO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “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.”

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Since joining CNCF, user adoptions, the community ecosystem, and project maturity have been steadily growing and improving. Rook is being used in production by several companies, including Calit2 UCSD, Finleap Connect, Geodata, and many others.

The maintainer team currently consists of 7 members, with a healthy distribution of organizations including Cloudical, Nexenta, Red Hat, Suse, and Upbound. Since becoming an incubating project in September 2018, contributors to the core Rook repository have grown by 260% from 90 to 279. Over the last 12 months, 184 distinct contributors have authored more than 1,140 pull requests.

“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,” said Travis Nielsen, Rook maintainer and senior principal software engineer at Red Hat. “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 2018, when we donated Rook to CNCF, there was strong interest and community around Kubernetes and a need for automated storage management for the cloud native community. It was important to make sure that Rook remained free and community-driven to continue to drive innovation for the broader ecosystem,” said Jared Watts, co-founder of Rook and founding engineer at Upbound. “We’re proud of Rook’s thriving community, thanks to CNCF leadership and support, and look forward to pushing the ecosystem forward as a mature, production-ready cloud native storage solution.”

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A security audit was performed by the CNCF Security SIG in December 2019, which resulted in 13 findings ranging from High to Low in severity, many of them common amongst open source projects. The Rook maintainers have taken steps to address these issues. The Security SIG reviewed the project and recommended to the TOC that the project should graduate with no substantive concerns regarding its architecture or health.

“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,” said Christian Hüning, technical director at Finleap Connect. “It is running flawless and delivers us the performance and resilience we require for our most critical business applications.”

“These are air-gapped installs running critical software on Kubernetes,” said Marc Campbell, founder and CTO at Replicated. “We rely on Rook to manage Ceph so that we get highly-available, redistributable block and object store without having to build it ourselves.”

“We’re happy to see the maturity of the project as it has gone through the different phases within the CNCF ecosystem and its introduction of the various other backends that we could use in the future,” said Moh Ahmed, cloud infrastructure engineer at the Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks.

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