Adoption & Ecosystem
Who uses it
The project's ADOPTERS.md lists only organisations that have publicly disclosed production use. The named adopters below are drawn from it.
| Organisation | Use case | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Calit2 | Runs one of the largest known Rook production clusters | ADOPTERS.md |
| NAV (Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration) | A public agency handling roughly a third of Norway's national budget; uses Rook to simplify Ceph operation | ADOPTERS.md |
| Replicated | Ships Rook as a standard add-on of its open-source kURL installer | ADOPTERS.md |
| Discogs | Runs Rook behind one of the largest music databases and marketplaces | ADOPTERS.md |
| Gini | Uses Ceph with Rook for redundant S3-compatible storage | ADOPTERS.md |
| Alauda | Uses Rook Ceph for data services in its container platform (ACP) | ADOPTERS.md |
ADOPTERS.md lists further organisations including Finleap Connect, CENGN, Avisi, and Cloudways.
Adoption signals
Measured on 2026-06-22 from the GitHub API: about 13,553 stars, 2,827 forks, and roughly 384 contributors (the contributor count is derived from the last page of a per_page=1 query) (rook/rook). Rook reached CNCF Graduated status in 2020 as the first block, file, and object storage project to do so (CNCF graduation announcement).
Ecosystem
Rook deploys and depends on ceph-csi, the CSI driver that carries the actual data path for provisioned volumes. Installation is a two-chart layout: the rook-ceph Helm chart installs the operator and the rook-ceph-cluster chart creates the cluster, both under deploy/charts (Getting Started). Rook integrates with Prometheus through the Ceph mgr's exporter and supports CSI snapshots. Through its CRDs it exposes RBD (block), CephFS (file), and RGW (S3-compatible object) from a single product, plus NFS, NVMe-of, object buckets, and COSI.
Alternatives
Rook and Ceph deliver block, file, and object storage from one system. The cost is operational: CRUSH maps, placement groups, and a higher CPU and memory footprint than the lighter alternatives (onidel comparison, darumatic comparison).
| Alternative | Differs by |
|---|---|
| Longhorn | Simpler block storage aimed at edge and mid-size clusters; far lower learning curve, no object/file in one product (onidel) |
| OpenEBS | Mayastor engine targets fast NVMe-of; cStor and Jiva engines aim at simpler setups (onidel) |
| Portworx | Commercial product with application-aware snapshots and disaster recovery (darumatic) |