Rancher
Labs, creators of the industry's most widely adopted Kubernetes
management platform, announced today The Cloud Native Computing
Foundation (CNCF) has accepted the company's innovative, vendor-neutral
container storage solution - Longhorn - 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.
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
easily while dramatically simplifying use and management.
Liz Rice, CNCF TOC Chair, commented: "Storage is an important area of
the Cloud Native landscape, so I'm delighted that Rancher are
contributing Longhorn to the CNCF. By becoming a CNCF Sandbox project,
Longhorn can help the open source community accelerate the maturity of
persistent block storage solutions for Kubernetes."
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. Deploying Longhorn as persistent storage
for Kubernetes brings three unique benefits:
-
Simplicity. 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.
-
Easy-to-use. 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.
-
Built-in multi-cluster backup and DR.
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.
Sheng Liang, CEO, Rancher said: "Longhorn's contribution to the CNCF
represents Rancher's long-term commitment to the wider cloud-native
eco-system and the Kubernetes community in particular. We're indebted to
the thousands of users who have already experimented with Longhorn and
have provided valuable feedback over the years. Becoming a CNCF project
will increase the awareness of Longhorn and accelerate its development
velocity."
For more information about Longhorn visit longhorn.io or the project page on Github.
If you're using Rancher 2.x, you can find Longhorn in the Rancher App
Catalog. It only takes a couple of clicks to install it from there. For
other platforms, the project page on Github includes instructions to
install Longhorn via Helm or through direct YAML manifests.