Rancher Labs Longhorn

2020: Release of major version (GA) of Longhorn

On June 11, 2020 the Rancher Labs company announced release of major version (GA) of the solution Longhorn - the distributed block storage (block storage) for Kubernetes clusters.

According to the company, Longhorn directly solves problems of the organization of persistent storage (Persistent Storage) of the corporate level, failsafe, independent of producers (vendor neutral), which allows to facilitate a full stroke of development and applications launch in Kubernetes ecosystem, with preserving of all data on their work.

Kubernetes for June, 2020 is even more often used as a basis during creation of infrastructure for modern applications. According to the marketing research conducted by IDC company by 2022 about 70% of the enterprises will use in the work Virtual Environments, Kubernetes and also workflows and tools for management of applications in cloud and corporate infrastructure.

As for June, 2020 more and more enterprises transfer the working services and applications to containers, the need for persistent container storage the - the distributed, failsafe data warehouse for containers significantly grows. told Sheng Liang, the CEO in Rancher Labs

Longhorn is the distributed block data warehouse created using microservices. Since in 2019 the Rancher Labs company released the beta of a product, thousands users of community CNCF considerably altered the solution Longhorn, at the expense of repeatedly carried out stress testings within the Sandbox project under the auspices of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The main (GA) version of the solution Longhorn contains a set of functionality, including:

• Thin-provisioning (technology of selection of memory blocks), snapshots, backup system and recovery
• Expansion of storage without idle time of work of service
• Support of intercluster disaster recovery, with the designated RPO parameters (backtracking point - equal to the admissible volume of possible data loss in case of failure) and RTO (the recovery time - designates an allowed time of idle time of service in case of failure)
• Longhorn updating, without need to stop work of the current functioning volumes
• Full integration into the command line interface Kubernetes and also separate user interface

Using Longhorn, users can create the distributed block storage with duplication/mirroring of data on local disks. The solution Longhorn allows to perform integration corporate storage systems with Kubernetes, at the expense of opportunities of deployment of Longhorn over used in NFS companies, iSCSI and Fibre Channel arrays of data storage (storage arrays) and also cloud storage systems, such as AWS EBS. At the same time users receive additional functions, such as: incremental snapshots in applications (application-aware snapshots), backup into additional storages (NFS or compatible to S3), remote replication of data, etc.