 This is your host up in the party and today we have with us Travis Nielsen senior principal software engineer at redhead Travis first of all welcome to the show. Thank you. It's good to be with you today Today we're going to talk about Rook graduation But before we go in there, can you tell us a bit about what is Rook and what problem it's trying to solve? Certainly Yeah, Rook is really in a nutshell. It's storage for kubernetes You know when we started with the cloud-mated environments kubernetes A few years ago. We looked at storage and we thought hey, how do how do I get storage and kubernetes? Storage is something external to kubernetes You connect it to your cloud provider storage or you have some external appliance that you connect to But we said hey let with let's take Rook or let's make Rook Bring storage to kubernetes. So it looks like any other kubernetes application You deploy storage in the same way No need for some external solution to storage. Can you talk about the the origin of Rook by origin? I'm moving that where the project originated then It came to cncf And then what kind of community built around it and then we'll talk about the graduation part So let's talk about the origin story of Rook. Yeah, originally Actually Rook was started before we even realized kubernetes was a big thing Kubernetes was still young. This is over four years ago now Where we were looking at Doing things in a cloud native way. We knew distributed architecture was a very important part of that storage was an important part of that So we thought well, how can we Do storage in a cloud native way? And we even started building our own solution based on ecd and But but that was complicated very quickly I mean building a distributed platform is very difficult And and so we we realized kubernetes has a solution for this already. Let's take a bet on it And almost four years ago now. We said, okay, we're gonna create an operator and I managed the storage for you And it was started on sef as well. So sef is a big part of the story where sef provides storage. It's been around for years and years as a stable storage platform And and since sef provides that stable storage layer Now we really just needed to bring the management layer to kubernetes so we can manage the storage for you No need to build a new data layer It's just let's bring something we already know works really well To the community and do it in an open source way kubernetes initially It was more or less like a state less workload now. We are talking a lot about a state full workload. So how has things changed here which kind of led to To need for something like brook kubernetes Typically you do have your think of stateless workloads as being something that kubernetes deploys but Pretty quickly as soon as you deploy your stateless workload you realize. Oh, well, it needs to connect to some storage whether it's a database or something else and You really don't want that to be some external solution or to deploy it any differently so the Really comes down to people need state they have stateful workloads and work has Basically filled that need for stateful workloads. Can you give example of what are the use cases where it is being used and How further along it's in part, you know from Evaluation versus it's already being used in production The only thing is that most of the technology that we talk about Even they are yet to graduate. They're already being used in production These are not a technology that are being developed here in a nursery They were created somewhere else They saw the problem and then they were put in cncf to build their community around it. So talk about The production usage of rook, right? So the I mean from the start we really tried to build the rook community And that was a foundation for it Open community open source open governance and And so with that philosophy, I feel like you know community members started to pick up on it You know, we were presenting at kubcon And people started to take note. I thought oh, this is really useful storage for kubernetes My staple workloads have some way of deploying now Very useful and so People initially were primarily deploying it in their you know, their on-prem solutions They have their own data center. They need some storage solution And there just wasn't you know, really an open solution open source solution before rook Where that gave them that in their bare metal environments And now it's expanded more. There are scenarios where rook is also useful in in cloud deployments So even if you're running in a cloud provider that has some storage behind it like in google cloud aws or azure or others Even if you're in those environments rook provides a consistent storage platform And also improves some scenarios around performance for small volumes and The number of volumes you can mount and things like that. So there are advantages You know a lot in bare metal environments where there's no other solution really and and even in cloud environments as You rightly mentioned that these technology were used in production. So what does graduation really mean? One the project itself or the the the The community itself And users does it really matter that project is graduated? That's a good question The I don't think anything would have changed ultimately in how we've created the project the features we're adding and things But really what graduation means to the project is that The community recognizes it as something that's positive for the the ecosystem You know the cncf has built this and helped nurture this ecosystem around kubernetes and distributed architecture cloud native solutions And you know, we're happy that they recognized rook as hey, this is an important part of that Solution to bring the storage to kubernetes And so it has brought more visibility more Edges more help in getting people on board Since it's an open source project. So everything is already there for people to see But still if we ask you what is the roadmap of rook look like or What are some of the challenges that you're still trying to solve or Features that you're looking at adding to the project. You know first and foremost we want to continue With our releases that are stable We have lots of people in production. So keeping them running first is always Is always the priority Beyond that it's really you know software is always evolving kubernetes has new versions come out seph has new versions come out And rook needs to adjust to those. And so I'd say that's the first priority keep up to date with whatever the latest platform is Is providing us but also Really, you know every with every update. There are new features The next release we have coming up in mid november. We're planning on Well a number of features. I guess I don't need to go into all of them, but ultimately adding new New features for the storage providers like seph seph is our main stable storage provider and also looking for contributions to get our other storage providers Up up to a stable state like nfs Cassandra and others That that are still in the alpha state just because we're looking for more Involvement from the community there to get that interest up Travis. Thank you so much for taking time out from your schedule today And talk about rook and I look forward to talk to you again. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. It's been good to be with you