FAQ

Yes. The Rook Ceph operator was declared stable in 2018, and Rook is a CNCF graduated project. Organizations run it in production at petabyte scale.

Your data keeps flowing. Rook is not in the Ceph data path: applications read and write directly to Ceph. Management tasks such as upgrades and configuration changes resume when the operator is back.

Both are installers recommended by the Ceph documentation. Choose Rook if you run Kubernetes and want storage managed through its APIs. Choose cephadm for Ceph clusters outside Kubernetes.

No. Rook runs the official upstream Ceph images, and the usual ceph tools and the Ceph Dashboard work as before. For the best performance, give Ceph its own networks.

A Kubernetes cluster on amd64 or arm64 nodes, with local disks or block volumes for Ceph. One VM is enough to try Rook; production starts at three nodes.

Change the Ceph version in your spec and Rook rolls the upgrade out across the daemons, checking Ceph’s health as it goes. A new minor release ships about every four months, and the two most recent are maintained.

Rook can encrypt data at rest and in transit, integrates with external key managers such as HashiCorp Vault, and has a private vulnerability disclosure process through the CNCF. It was audited by Trail of Bits in 2019.

Yes. The companies on our support page offer Rook support and services, and several commercial storage products are built on Rook.

Running Ceph daemons and mounted volumes keep serving data. New pods, volumes and mounts wait until the control plane is back, so plan its availability like any other dependency of your storage.

Your data is on the Ceph disks, not in Kubernetes. The disaster recovery guide shows how to bring an existing Rook Ceph cluster up in a new Kubernetes cluster.

Yes. In external mode, Rook connects your Kubernetes workloads to a Ceph cluster you already run, for example one managed by cephadm.

Yes. In the cloud, Rook builds Ceph on block volumes from your provider’s storage class. For air-gapped sites, mirror the images to your own registry.

Maintainers come from several companies and research organizations, and more than 580 organizations have contributed. Governance rules bar any single company from holding a majority on the steering committee.

Yes. Each storage type is a separate resource, so you deploy only what you need: an object store, block pools, a filesystem, or any mix.

Rook is Apache 2.0. Ceph is LGPL (2.1 or 3.0).

Ask in the Rook Slack or GitHub Discussions, and join the monthly community meeting.