It’s been less than two years since we started the Rook project, and today we’re celebrating Rook’s graduation to the CNCF Incubating stage, joining the likes of gRPC, Helm and Envoy. Rook is the first cloud native storage project to make it into the CNCF and we could not be more thrilled with the support of the amazing community building around it.

When we launched the project in 2016, our goals from the onset were:

• Create a persistent storage solution for cloud native applications that works across environments and providers
• Deeply integrate with Kubernetes to provide a native experience for running storage as a service
• Provide a simple to deploy yet intelligent storage solution that is self-managing, self-scaling, and self-healing

Rook fills a critical gap within the Kubernetes ecosystem. We saw time and time again organizations running into storage problems when deploying Kubernetes, and those wanting to own their data and move it to the clouds/environment of your choice. Rook makes it easy to run a production grade storage solution within the Kubernetes cluster, and brings a new level of workload portability to the cloud native ecosystem.

Rook has big aspirations for solving important storage needs of modern applications and with this upwords move in the CNCF family, we’re getting closer to having an industry preferred solution. As Kubernetes adoption expands the underpinnings of cloud computing, Rook is that important element delivering a diverse set of storage solutions, that is important for a portable cloud environment.

Here at Upbound we will continue to invest in Rook, and look forward to continuing to work with the community as we march together towards a 1.0 release. A big thank you to the community for supporting the Rook mission and continuing to help us bring forward a more portable cloud computing platform. Thank you to Jared Watts on our team, as well as Travis Neilsen, who have been instrumental in leading forward Rook development and getting it to where it is today. Also a big thank you to Alexander Trost for all of his help and support.

For more information about Rook moving into the CNCF incubator please see the Rook blog post here.