The appeal of Kubernetes is that it lives high in the computing architecture stack, manipulating containers of software from cloud to cloud and requiring little customization for underlying hardware components. But behind the shine of Kubernetes’ meteoric rise, the story of storage can’t be lost. One tale worth telling is that of Rook.io, a cloud-native storage platform built for Kubernetes. Launched in 2018, Rook is the first persistent storage project from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a non-profit that houses the Kubernetes project and other cloud-native initiatives.

The release of Rook 1.0 brings fresh opportunities for software engineers to automate and integrate storage operations. At Red Hat Inc., the open-source powerhouse uses Rook to expand storage services for its customers, according to Erin Boyd (pictured), senior principal software engineer at Red Hat Inc.

Boyd spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host and cloud economist Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Barcelona, Spain. They discussed where storage capabilities should be now that cloud technology has advanced, the strengths of Kubernetes, and the capabilities of Rook (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s Note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Miniman: What does hybrid cloud mean for your customers?

Boyd: Hybrid cloud means following the model of [Red Hat Enterprise Linux]. It’s everywhere, so it’s having [Red Hat OpenShift] run on top of that and being able to have the application portability that you’d expect all along. It’s also having the data agility within those applications.

Miniman: Have we started to cross the gap between the mythical nirvana of where storage should live up to the distributed architecture that we’re all looking for?

Boyd: With Kubernetes, the history is that we started off with only file systems. Block is something very new within the past couple of releases that I personally worked on. The next piece we’re doing at Red Hat is leading the charge to create [custom resource definitions] for object storage so it’s defining those APIs and customers can dynamically provision and manage their object storage.

In addition, we recently acquired a company called NooBaa that does exactly that. They’re able to have that data mobility through object buckets across many clouds doing the replication with the ability to dedupe, and that’s super important because it opens the doors for our customers to have image streams, photos, and things like that that they typically use within an enterprise and to quickly move the data and copy it as they need to.

Miniman: Storage built for the cloud world is what we’re talking about there. How’s that different from some of the previous storage solutions that we’ve been dealing with?

Boyd: So I think before we were trying to maybe make fit what didn’t work. That’s not to say that file and block aren’t important. I mean, having local storage for a high-performance application is absolutely critical. So I think we’re meeting the market where it is. It’s dependent on the behavior of the application, and we should be able to provide that. And applications that primarily run in the cloud and need that flexibility, we should be offering object as a first-class citizen, and that’s why our work with those CRDs is really critical.

Quinn: What is the customer need that drives this? What is it that’s driving this into making it a first-class citizen being built into Kubernetes itself?

Boyd: It allows us to create the personas we need, so it allows an administrator to administrate storage just like they would normally with your persistent volume, persistent volume claims, and quotas. Then, it abstracts the details of, for example, the URLs in your applications. We use a config map within the app so the user doesn’t necessarily have access to your keys in the cloud.

It also creates a user, so you’re able to manage users like you would with normal object, which is a little different than the [persistent volume/persistent volume claim], and that’s why we feel like it’s important to have a CRD that defines object in that sense.

Miniman: Give us an update regarding what Rook is, how it all fits in, and the level of maturity you’re seeing with it.

Boyd: Rook is a great [Cloud Native Computing Foundation] project with a healthy community behind it. One of the provisioners we created as part of those object CRDs is a Rook provisioner for CEPH object. We also have an S3 provisioner; so just like we had external provisioners in Kubernetes, we allow for the same contributions from the community for those.

One of the key things that Rook offered was the ability to ease the deployment of storage and the administration of it. Rook has a plethora of different storage systems that it provides, so we’re really pushing [Rook]. Red Hat, which I think is important, is having operators, like the Operator Hub that was released with OpenShift 4.0. Rook will be an operator in there. That allows for more automation and true scaling, because that’s where we want to get to.

Quinn: What do you think customers are having their biggest challenges with? What are these larger companies seeing as being limiting factors on their digital transformations?

Boyd: With Kubernetes turning five years old, I think customers are also maturing. They’re entering the landscape, learning about Kubernetes, learning how to containerize, how to lift and ship their applications — and then they’re running up costs and lock-in and things they want to avoid. And that’s really where we, in the community, want to provide a platform and a runway for them to have more choices.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE