SUSE, a global enabler in open source innovation and owner of the Rancher container management platform, has unveiled Longhorn 1.1.
Longhorn was a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox project since October 2019. Since Longhorn was launched in June 2020, adoption has increased 235% and Longhorn has become a mainstay in the Kubernetes storage landscape. With this latest version, Rancher users can now use a Kubernetes-native storage solution in underperforming hardware at the edge.
Longhorn 1.1 enables DevOps teams to easily manage persistent data sets in any Kubernetes environment and offers an enterprise-grade, yet vendor-independent approach to cloud-native storage. With this latest update, Rancher users can make their edge environments even more stable with ARM64 support, new self-healing functions and the improved performance transparency that Longhorn 1.1 offers.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, three-quarters of the data generated by companies will be created and processed at the edge – outside of a traditional centralized data center or cloud. That is a significant increase: in 2018 it was only 10 percent. With this growth in mind, Longhorn 1.1 enables developers to securely build applications and store data in edge environments on devices with limited resources.
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 variety 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 is designed to help teams store data reliably, even in the most difficult and resource-constrained environments. It also has support for ARM64 – one of the features the community has asked about the most.
Drive efficient container performance
Improving efficiency is always the top priority for users of the K8s community. Longhorn now offers “ReadWriteMany” support across containers, giving developers an efficient persistent storage solution that allows volumes to be read and written at any time across multiple containers. In contrast to “ReadWriteOnce” methods, Longhorn 1.1 enables teams To share disk space between different paths on different nodes.
Improved transparency and operational support
Longhorn 1.1 provides better visibility and functionality for an organization’s storage infrastructure. With the new built-in support for Prometheus, users now have real-time metrics for the health of their storage (monitoring, resource usage, tracking, etc.). With this support for Prometheus, users have a much more granular view of cluster performance. Finally, with the new support for CSI Snapshotter, users can create / restore backups via “kubectl ‘”.
Improved maintenance functionality
Another innovation in Longhorn 1.1 is the expanded options for node maintenance. Longhorn now supports Kubernetes drain operations to help users safely perform node maintenance. Longhorn 1.1 also provides the ability to discover the existing hard drives on a new node, which provides a better operating environment for cloud providers.
Increased resistance
At the top of the list of priorities for most organizations is mitigating network problems. With Longhorn 1.1, a new data locality function was introduced to increase the reliability in unstable network conditions (e.g. in edge scenarios). This new capability keeps a replica of storage in place with the workload itself and ensures that access to storage is never lost even if the node temporarily loses network connectivity.
Longhorn 1.1 is much simpler than other software-defined storage solutions, and aims to deliver fast, reliable storage for most use cases without the baggage of older approaches.
Current Rancher users can easily install Longhorn directly from the Rancher app catalog. Longhorn is also free to download and use. Customers who need support can purchase a premium support model with the same SLAs that are provided through SUSE Support Services. There are no license fees and the node-based subscription pricing keeps costs to a minimum.
