The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which houses the open-source Kubernetes project and other cloud-native technology initiatives, said today that Rook has become its latest project to graduate.

Rook is an open-source, cloud-native storage orchestrator for Kubernetes, which is used to manage large clusters of containers that house the components of modern applications. It’s designed to make cloud-native Kubernetes clusters and the applications and services running inside them more self-sufficient and portable, by providing persistent block, file and object storage. Rook does this by taking traditional storage systems such as Ceph and transforming them into cloud-native services that run on top of Kubernetes.

Persistent storage is important for Kubernetes-based applications because it enables data to be retained after those apps have been shut down. Before Rook arrived on the scene, a lot of earlier Kubernetes deployments relied on cumbersome external storage systems to provide persistent storage. In public cloud deployments, that meant using a managed service such as Amazon S3, while on-premises deployments would be forced to rely on traditional storage hardware.

“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 CNCF Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer Chris Aniszczyk. “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.”

Since first being accepted as a CNCF project in 2018, Rook has come a long way with growing user adoption. The project has matured significantly and its community ecosystem has grown substantially, with the likes of Cloudical Deutschland GmbH, Nexenta Systems Inc., Red Hat Inc. and SUSE Group all contributing towards it, the CNCF said.

Rook underwent a security audit by the CNCF Security SIG in December 2019 that resulted in 13 issues being found. The project’s maintainers have since taken steps to address those issues, and Rook now meets all of the CNCF’s criteria for graduation, the foundation said.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that persistent storage has become one of the hottest areas in the Kubernetes ecosystem in recent months. There are other open-source projects working on the problem, with one notable example being TiKV, which is also hosted by the CNCF.

Established providers are creating their own persistent storage solutions too. For example, NetApp Inc. has announced its Project Astra and Pure Storage Inc. recently acquired a company called Portworx Inc. that specializes in cloud-native storage. Then there are startups, including MayaData Inc. and Ionir Ltd., that have only just landed on the scene.

“The market is wide open for open-source and other persistent storage offerings,” Mueller said. “This makes it harder for companies to select the right storage framework for their next-generation apps, but competition is a good thing and nobody ever said it would be easy to pick the winners. Companies considering a persistent storage option need to keep an eye on things such as adoption and contributions, because open-source roller coasters can be steep.”

Erin Boyd, a senior principal software engineer at Red Hat, sat down with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the 2019 KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Barcelona, Spain, to talk about how her company was leveraging Rook to automate and integrate persistent storage into its Kubernetes platform:

Image: Rook.io