CNCF Announces the Graduation of Rook

Oct. 14, 2020, 1:18 a.m.

TL;DR

Founded in 2015, the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) is a part of the nonprofit Linux foundation project. It serves as the home for several open-source projects like the Kubernetes, Envoy, and Prometheus. The CNCF has recently announced that Rook has now joined its family of graduated projects.

CNCF Announces the Graduation of Rook, Open-Source, Cloud-Native Storage for Kubernetes

Key Facts

1
Rook founded its way into the CNCF projects in 2018. It is the thirteenth CNCF project and the first one based on block, file, or object storage that has reached graduation.
2
Rook began by the project name ‘Castle.’ Since that name was difficult to trademark, the team went by Rook as it is a chess piece that resembles a castle.
3
The CNCF security audit identified 13 issues in Rook in December 2019. The project graduated after the rectification of those 13 issues.
4
Several companies like Geodata, Finleap Connect, and Calit2 UCSD have begun using Rook in production.
5
The maintainer team of Rook consists of several well-known companies like Red Hat, Nexenta, Cloudical, Upbound, and Suse.

Details

Rook is open source, cloud-based storage for Kubernetes. It provides the framework, platform, and the necessary support for several storage solutions to integrate with the cloud-based environment.

The CNCF considered several factors before moving Rook from incubation to graduation. These factors were an open governance process, increasing adoption, feature maturity, and a strong commitment to sustainability, community, and inclusivity.

There are three levels of maturity for any CNCF project- sandbox, incubation, and graduation. The maturity level of a project is an indicator by CNCF about what sort of enterprises should be adopting different projects.

To find its way into the sandbox stage, a project must be sponsored by at least 3 of the 11 TOC members. The project should also adopt the CNCF Code of Conduct and the CNCF IP Policy.

The process for projects to be accepted into the CNCF (Image courtesy: www.cncf.io/projects)

At the incubation stage, due diligence is performed on the projects. For a project to move into the incubation stage, it must be used in production by at least three independent end users. It should also have a significant number of committers and demonstrate an increasing flow of contributors.

To graduate, a project must meet all the requirements of the incubation stage and receive a commitment from at least two organizations. It should also clear a security audit and achieve and maintain the Core Infrastructure Initiative Best Practices Badge.

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. 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.
Chris Aniszczyk
CTO/COO, CNCF