Today, live from KubeCon Seattle, Rook is announcing the v0.9.0 release. In this release Ceph support has moved to stable. In addition, Rook has added expanded support for additional storage solutions, now doubling the number of supported storage solutions in Rook. New storage solution support includes Cassandra, Network File System (NFS) and Nexenta EdgeFS. You can read more about the release on the Rook blog or read on below for highlights of the release.

Ceph Support Moves to Stable
Ceph is now stable and supported in Rook making it possible for enterprise users to explore new, broadened use cases. Now that Ceph is stable in Rook, there is a:

• New Ceph focused CSI plugin that provides dynamically provisioned storage.
• New Ceph versions can be deployed by the Rook operator (Mimic and Nautilus), and there is initial support for automatic upgrades between the versions.
• More robust coverage of diverse storage types by leveraging the ceph-volume tool

“I'm thrilled to see Rook's support for provisioning and managing Ceph stabilize,” said Sage Weil, founder and chief architect of Ceph.  “Our community is committed to making Ceph an excellent storage choice for Kubernetes, both as an object, block, and file storage provider for applications and as a well-behaved tenant.”

Additional Storage Solutions
Prior to the v.0.9.0  release, Rook offered Ceph, CockroachDB, and Minio as supported storage options.  The list of supported storage solutions in Rook now doubles with this release adding new support for NFS, Apache Cassandra, and Nexenta EdgeFS.  Current users of these storage systems will like the ease of use and simple experience offered by these new Rook operators as they begin to transition their workloads to Kubernetes.

Behind this growth in new storage support is the Rook framework for storage providers, which provides a common set of libraries and specs to drastically ease the burden of integration for storage solutions into cloud native environments like Kubernetes.  These new storage providers will be alpha for this release and are expected to mature towards being declared stable over the next few releases.

Rook at KubeCon
If you are at KubeCon this week and want to learn more, join us at the below Rook talks or come by the Rook booth, S40, in the expo hall. We can’t wait to see you at KubeCon this week and discuss the future of cloud native storage orchestration for Kubernetes. In addition you can see the full schedule of where Upbound will be this week here.

Tuesday, December 11 at 4:30 pm
Intro: Rook - Jared Watts, Senior Rook Maintainer and Founding Engineer at Upbound
Location: 2 A/B
In this talk, we will be introducing the Rook project to attendees of all levels and experience. Rook is an open source cloud-native storage orchestrator for Kubernetes, providing the platform, framework, and support for a diverse set of storage solutions to natively integrate with cloud-native environments. Rook turns storage software into self-managing, self-scaling, and self-healing storage services. It does this by automating deployment, bootstrapping, configuration, provisioning, scaling, upgrading, migration, disaster recovery, monitoring, and resource management. We will explore the benefits and use cases of Rook, and we will also walk through the architecture that the project is built on. Rook was accepted as the first storage project hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in January 2018.

Thursday, December 13 at 11:40 am
Deep Dive: Rook - Travis Nielsen, Rook Maintainer and Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat
Location: 618-620
The Rook operator implements custom resource definitions (CRDs) to express desired state of storage providers for Kubernetes. This deep dive will review the framework Rook provides to integrate the storage providers with an operator and CRDs. As an example, details of the Ceph operator will be shown, including how it builds on the Rook framework and how Ceph’s specific orchestration needs are met. The Ceph mons require special handling to stay in quorum and handle failover. Ceph OSDs require several stages of discovery and provisioning before the daemons are started. The Ceph mgr runs an active and standby daemon for high availability. For object storage, Rook creates all the pools and starts the rgw daemons needed. For a shared file system, Rook creates the pools and starts the MDS daemon with a standby. These and other challenges with the Ceph daemons will be discussed.

Thursday, December 13 at 4:30 pm
Adding a New Storage Provider to Rook - Jared Watts, Upbound.io
Location: 611-614
The CNCF hosted Rook project has built a framework for running stateful workloads on Kubernetes, enabling storage providers to seamlessly and effectively integrate into cloud native environments. This framework is already being used to support multiple storage providers such as Ceph, CockroachDB, Minio and NFS.

In this talk, Jared will walk through how new storage providers can also take advantage of this framework to easily and reliably run on Kubernetes. He will also cover the benefits that Rook provides to make this transition to cloud native environments easier for new storage providers. Finally, the important architecture, design, and concepts for running storage solutions on Kubernetes will be explored in detail.

Rook is cloud native storage orchestration for Kubernetes. Upbound, who recently launched crossplane, is the founding company behind the project. Follow Rook on Twitter @rook_io or on GitHub here.