Rancher Labs announced on Tuesday that The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has accepted Longhorn, its vendor-neutral container storage solution as its latest Sandbox project. Longhorn joins 20 other current projects and was accepted in recognition of the unique value it brings to the cloud-native ecosystem.
Key capabilities of Longhorn (currently v0.6.2) include enterprise-grade distributed block storage, volume snapshots, built-in backup and restore, live upgrades without impacting running volumes, cross-cluster disaster recovery with defined RTO and RPO, one-click installation, and an intuitive user interface.
Longhorn is much simpler than traditional storage software. Longhorn implements its enterprise-grade storage features with only 30,000 lines of Go code, including both the data plane (Longhorn engine) and the management plane (Longhorn manager). Longhorn is lightweight because Rancher builds on storage technologies that already exist in the Linux operating system. The speed and capacity of modern storage hardware like SSD and NVMe also led to a greatly simplified design.
Most users interact with Longhorn through its free UI, and it exposes a storage class for easy provisioning of replicated volumes. Longhorn can be installed and upgraded with a few clicks, without needing to first read all of the documentation to understand every nuance. The Longhorn UI not only offers visibility into storage volumes, but it also helps teams understand the Kubernetes workload that created the volume.
Longhorn protects data at multiple levels. As enterprise-grade distributed storage, Longhorn replicates data synchronously across multiple nodes. Users can create snapshots directly in primary storage and revert to previous snapshots from the UI. They can also make backups of snapshots to secondary storage and recover the volume to the same cluster or a different one.
Users can even create a read-only asynchronous replica in a different cluster, making it possible to quickly recover data and the application in case of a cluster failure.
As enterprises increasingly look to use containers to manage stateful apps -- any program that saves client data from the activities of one session for use in the next session – they require support for persistent storage.
However, the market for persistent storage is still nascent with complexity and a lack of enterprise capabilities as key challenges. Longhorn helps teams manage stateful workloads in Kubernetes by providing a solution for persistent storage that can be deployed, while simplifying use and management.
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