History
Origin
Rook began as a GitHub project on 2016-07-08 (rook/rook). It was started by Bassam Tabbara, who went on to found and lead Upbound, with early backing from Quantum (Upbound blog). The premise was deliberate: rather than write a new storage system for containers, Rook would take Ceph, a distributed storage system with a long production track record, and make it a first-class cloud-native service that Kubernetes could operate declaratively (Upbound blog, rook.io).
That choice shaped everything that followed. Rook owns the control plane (how Ceph daemons are deployed, configured, and upgraded) and leaves the data path to Ceph and its CSI driver.
Timeline
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2016 | Repository created; project founded by Bassam Tabbara with Quantum as early sponsor |
| 2018 | Accepted by CNCF as its 15th hosted project, the first storage project in CNCF |
| 2019 | CNCF Security SIG audit produced 13 findings (High to Low), all addressed |
| 2020 | Graduated from CNCF, the first block/file/object storage project to do so |
How it evolved
Early Rook reached beyond Ceph. Before v0.9 it also supported CockroachDB and Minio, and later releases added storage providers such as NFS, Cassandra, and EdgeFS (Upbound blog). That breadth did not last. The project converged on Ceph as its single supported backend, and the Cassandra and NFS providers were split out into separate repositories (Upbound blog). The operator code today reflects a Ceph-only focus.
Growth tracked the narrowing of scope. During CNCF incubation the core repository's contributor count rose from 90 to 279, a 260% increase (CNCF graduation announcement). The 2019 security audit by the CNCF Security SIG, with findings ranging from High to Low severity, was completed and remediated ahead of graduation (CNCF graduation announcement).
Rook joined the CNCF in January 2018 as its 15th hosted project and the first storage project under the foundation (CNCF blog). It reached Graduated status on 2020-10-07, the first block, file, and object storage project to do so (CNCF graduation announcement).
Where it stands now
Rook is a graduated CNCF project under a steering committee whose members include Travis Nielsen (Red Hat) and Jared Watts (Independent/Upbound), with active maintainers such as leseb, BlaineEXE, satoru-takeuchi, subhamkrai, and sp98 (OWNERS.md). Red Hat carries significant weight here because Rook underpins Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation. The project releases on a regular cadence; the commit documented here, 63eed4e (2026-06-19), sits just after the v1.20.1 tag (2026-06-16) (rook/rook).