Rook-Ceph storage Operator now on OperatorHub.io

We are excited to announce the addition of the Rook-Ceph storage Operator to OperatorHub.io.  Operators are design patterns that augment and implement common day one and day two activities with Kubernetes clusters, simplifying application deployments and empowering developers to focus on creation versus remediation. The Rook-Ceph Operator is an upstream effort that Red Hat is leading and is using as part of its work towards Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4.

Developing and deploying cloud-native applications at scale can be complex and challenging. The new Rook-Ceph storage Operator is designed to automate the packaging, deployment, management, upgrading, and scaling of Ceph clusters that provide persistent storage to stateful applications as well as infrastructure services (logging, metrics, registry) in Kubernetes clusters. The release of Rook’s Ceph Operator augments Kubernetes scheduling with a complement of stateful storage services including block, filesystem and object storage.

Rook’s Ceph Operator helps simplify storage constructs for application developers and delivers self-service stateful data volumes, enabling them to focus on writing and testing code without worrying about provisioning storage and infrastructure. The Rook-Ceph storage Operator also helps cloud architects and storage administrators to maintain control over and visibility into the infrastructure.

Benefits and features of the Rook-Ceph Operator

The Rook-Ceph community release enables open source developers to deliver data-driven services, and includes a number of features.

Cloud-Native Storage Orchestration

Rook integrates with Ceph to deliver a self-managed, self-scaling, and self-healing storage infrastructure. It helps automate deployment, bootstrapping, configuration, provisioning, scaling, upgrading, migration, monitoring and resource management.

Block, File and Object storage service

Ceph Storage can provide block, file, or object storage based on application needs. Ceph’s scalability and robustness are already used in cloud and web-scale applications. Rook’s Ceph Operator is the only open source storage Operator available today via OperatorHub.io that delivers object storage. It is also used to back a variety of applications ranging from relational databases, NoSQL databases, CI/CD tool-sets, messaging, to AI/ML and analytics.

High Availability and Resiliency

A key Ceph architectural tenet is to have no single point of failure (SPoF) in the system. Ceph has been designed to provide fault tolerance and around the clock availability in environments where hosts, disks, and even network segments may fail, hosts and networking equipment are receiving a continuous stream of updates, and where hardware is being added or retired on a regular basis.

Data Protection

Ceph provides a number of durability strategies that include configurable replication and erasure coding. On-disk, inter-cluster, and cluster-to-client communication utilize checksums to help provide end-to-end data integrity. Ceph periodically validates the checksum of its data and makes repairs as necessary for continued protection.

Consistent storage platform across hybrid cloud

Deploying Ceph on-premises can extend cloud modalities into one's own data center. Likewise, Ceph is capable of offering provider agnostic storage options for those with cloud-first initiatives. This combination is designed to give developers a uniform experience across multiple public cloud providers or across their public and private infrastructure.

Scale Up or Down

DevOps teams now can have the flexibility of elastic scalability to scale up to the petabyte level, as well as down to smaller Kubernetes clusters. Rook’s Ceph Operator can address increases or decreases in demand for performance and spatial capacity.

Dashboard

The Rook-Ceph storage Operator provides a dashboard to help DevOps teams keep their finger on the pulse of the Ceph clusters supporting their organization’s applications.

The Evolution of Data Services for Cloud Native Application EcoSystems

Red Hat is continually evolving and preparing for the future of the enterprise, as evidenced by the evolution of Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage, like the rest of the OpenShift portfolio, is evolving to try to meet the needs of cloud-native applications. We believe our users need a common, multi-cloud object interface for data-intensive applications as well as traditional persistent volumes (RWX, RWO) for stateful applications. The Rook-Ceph storage Operator is designed to support this evolution as data intensive workloads shift to a Kubernetes cloud native application development ecosystem.

The Rook-Ceph storage Operator is an upstream project for Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4 and encompasses two projects with community support: Rook.io and Ceph. Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4 combines Rook, Ceph, and Red Hat’s recently acquired NooBaa multi-cloud gateway technology.

Upstream Community First

Red Hat continues to believe and practice community-driven upstream development, which is why we choose to release the Rook-Ceph storage Operator to the community first. Red Hat also participates in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), OpenShift Commons and other instrumental cloud-native upstream projects, including Kubernetes, Rook, Ceph, NooBaa, and Prometheus. We're excited to work with the larger community on the technological evolution of container native storage.