CNCF announces 15th project
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a non profit organization dedicated to the development of cloud native applications, announced it has voted to accept Rook as its 15th hosted project, following Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt, CNI, Envoy, Jaeger, Notary and TUF.
Rook is a platform that provides cluster-aware management for Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an open source project that has become the de facto standard of container orchestration. Using file, block and object storage systems, Rook is able to make cloud-native clusters self-sufficient and portable, according to The Linux Foundation.
Rather than create a storage system from scratch, Rook centers around turning a storage system like Ceph into a set of cloud-native services, which can run on top of Kubernetes. This is beneficial in that it preserves data even after container-based applications cease running.
Challenges surrounding persistent storage have been noted as one of the major barriers of container adoption. In the Portworx 2017 Annual Container Adoption Survey, persistent storage was cited as the number one challenge for running containers, with 26% of the sample identifying persistent storage as the most difficult challenge to overcome.
The non-profit voted Rook as an inception-level project under the CNCF Graduation Criteria v1.0. Every project by the CNCF is deemed an associated level of maturity of either inception, incubating or graduated. Since Rook is an inception-level project, it is not as far developed as incubation-level projects like Kubernetes and Envoy.
“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, COO of Cloud Native Computing Foundation, in a statement. “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.”
Rook is currently available in an alpha state. Beta and production-ready versions are expected to be available in the first half of 2018.
