Rook's hooked to cook bit nooks by the book

Container storage tech gets adopted by Cloud Native Computing Foundation

The organization overseeing container juggling system Kubernetes has decided to befriend a storage project.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) on Thursday said its Technical Oversight Committee voted to to bring Rook into its stable of open source projects, a group that includes Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt, CNI, Envoy, Jaeger, Notary and TUF.

Kubernetes deployments typically rely on external systems to provide persistent storage. This might take the form of Amazon Elastic Block Store, Azure Disk, or Google Cloud Engine Persistent Disk in a public cloud deployment or traditional on-premises hardware.

Rook coordinates File, Block and Object storage systems inside the Kubernetes cluster, making the bundle of bits more portable across different service providers.

Rook isn't itself a storage system. Rather it "turns distributed storage systems into self-managing, self-scaling, and self-healing storage services," as the project's GitHub repo explains.

It's an orchestrator for distributed storage systems just as Kubernetes is an orchestrator for containers.

"Rook integrates deeply into Kubernetes providing a seamless experience for security, policies, quotas, lifecycle management, and resource management," explains Bassam Tabbara, CEO of Upbound and creator of Rook, in a blog post. "It extends the Kubernetes API and is implemented as a controller for storage."

The open source software can presently manage the distributed storage system Ceph, automating various administrative tasks like configuring, provisioning, scaling, and monitoring. The plan is to add support for other storage systems and orchestration environments beyond Kubernetes.

Presently designated an alpha release, Rook's contributors aim to deliver beta and production-ready versions in the first half of 2018. The software is already being tested at a handful of organizations including Acaleph, FlexShopper, HBO, Norwegian Welfare, UCSD Nautilus Project, and Verne Global. ®