CNCF’s Rook Project Brings Storage Capability to Cloud-Native Workloads
Cloud-native storage software storage Rook has been accepted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an inception-level project.
“Storage is one of the most important components of cloud-native computing, yet persistent storage systems typically run outside the cloud-native environments today,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CNCF chief operating officer, in a statement.
Rook takes on the challenge of setting up storage for applications that run primarily in cloud environments, a challenging task given the complexities of storage and the ease of which workloads can be moved across different cloud environments. Rook can unify file, block and object storage types under the purview of a Kubernetes cluster, which can provide a bridge across the storage and the applications that need the storage.
“Rook was one of the early adopters of the Kubernetes operator pattern and we’re excited to bring in Rook as an inception-level project to advance the state of cloud-native storage,” Aniszczyk said.
Built on Ceph, the open source Rook offers easily scalable file, block and object storage resources that can be run on commodity hardware. It also comes with additional data protection functionality, such as snapshot, cloning and versioning.
- 47 contributors
- 1,935 GitHub stars
- 13 releases
- 1,463 commits
- 1.25M+ container downloads
By incorporating storage under Kubernetes, users can develop a completely self-sufficient and portable cloud-native cluster that could run across multiple cloud services, as well as in-house deployments.
Rook is an inception-level project under the CNCF Graduation Criteria v1.0. The CNCF provides every project an associated maturity level of either inception, incubating or graduated. To be qualified as an inception-level project, the software must add value to cloud-native computing and be aligned with the CNCF charter.
The project is the 15th cloud-native focused project to be hosted by the CNCF, alongside Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt, CNI, Envoy, Jaeger, Notary and TUF.
Rook is, in essence, extending the Kubernetes operator pattern to recognize storage clusters, storage pools, object stores and file systems, noted Rook creator Bassam Tabbara, CEO of Upbound, in a recent Software Engineering Daily podcast.
An alpha version of Rook (release 0.6) is currently available, with a production version promised by the first half of 2018.
The recently released Kubernetes 1.9, introduced an alpha implementation of the Container Storage Interface, which promises to make installing new volume plugins as easy as deploying a pod. This opens a path for third-party storage providers to support Kubernetes deployments.
“It’s a natural fit to run a storage cluster on Kubernetes. It makes perfect sense to bring it into the fold and keep the unified management interface,” said Dan Kerns, senior director at Quantum, the initial sponsor of the Rook project, in a statement.
Kubernetes Sets the Stage for Container-Native Storage
Feature image via Pixabay.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is a sponsor of The New Stack.