SUSE celebrates the release of Longhorn 1.1.
Longhorn has been a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox project
since October 2019. Since becoming generally available in June 2020, Longhorn
adoption has increased by +235% to become a mainstay of the Kubernetes storage
landscape. With this latest release, Rancher users can now leverage a
Kubernetes-native storage solution in low-powered hardware at the edge.
Longhorn 1.1 allows DevOps
teams to easily manage persistent data volumes in any Kubernetes environment
while bringing an enterprise-grade but vendor neutral approach to cloud-native
storage. With this latest update, Rancher users can build additional resilience
into their edge environments with ARM64 support, new self-healing capabilities,
and increased performance visibility provided by Longhorn 1.1.
Gartner predicts that by 2025,
three-quarters of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed at
the edge - outside a traditional centralized datacenter or cloud. That's a
sharp increase from just 10 percent in 2018. With this growth in mind, Longhorn
1.1 allows developers to confidently build applications and store data in edge
environments on resource-constrained devices.
What's New in Longhorn 1.1?
Longhorn is 100% open source,
microservices-centric, and cloud-native storage for Kubernetes deployments.
Longhorn 1.1 brings a host of new features and improvements for enterprise
DevOps teams, including:
Robust Kubernetes-native
storage at the Edge
Longhorn 1.1 extends
Kubernetes-native storage capabilities to support edge deployments. It's
designed to help teams store data reliably within even the most hostile and
resource-constrained environments. It also comes with support for ARM64 - one
of the most requested features from the community.
Driving efficient container
performance
Improving efficiency is
consistently top of mind for users in the K8s community. Likely to be a popular
introduction, Longhorn now offers ‘ReadWriteMany' support across containers,
giving developers an efficient persistent storage solution that enables volumes
to be read and written across multiple containers at any time. Unlike
‘ReadWriteOnce' methodologies, Longhorn 1.1 allows teams to share volume
storage between different paths on different nodes.
Enhanced Visibility and
Operations Support
Longhorn 1.1 brings better
insights and functionality within an organization's storage infrastructure.
With new integrated support for Prometheus baked in, users now have real-time
metrics of their storage health (monitoring, resource usage, tracking, etc.).
With this support for Prometheus, users have a much more detailed view of
cluster performance. Finally, with new support for CSI Snapshotter, users can
create/restore backups via ‘kubectl'.
Boosted Maintenance
Functionality
Another new arrival with
Longhorn 1.1 is enhanced node maintenance capabilities. Longhorn now supports
Kubernetes drain operations to aid users with the safe performance of node
maintenance. Longhorn 1.1 also features the ability to recognize the existing
disks on a new node, which provides a better operational environment for Cloud
Providers.
Increased Resilience
Top of the priority list for
most companies is mitigating network issues. A new Data Locality feature has
been introduced with Longhorn 1.1 to increase resilience in unstable network
conditions (e.g., in edge scenarios). This new capability will keep a storage
replica local to the workload itself, ensuring that, even if the node
temporarily loses network connectivity, access to storage will never be lost.
Longhorn 1.1 is much simpler
than other software-defined storage solutions aiming to deliver fast, reliable
storage to most use cases without the bloat of legacy approaches.
Existing users of Rancher can
easily install Longhorn directly from Rancher's app catalog. Longhorn is also
free to download and use, and customers looking for support can purchase a
premium support model with the same SLAs provided through SUSE Support
Services. There are no licensing fees, and node-based subscription pricing
keeps costs to a minimum.