Longhorn 1.2: Enhanced Storage Reliability and Performance

Introduction

Longhorn 1.2 — Enhanced Storage Reliability and Performance — was released on June 22, 2021.

Day‑2 operations is where clusters earn their keep — backups, restores, upgrades, and performance under real workload churn.

In this release: Longhorn 1.2 improves storage reliability with enhanced backup capabilities, better performance, and expanded CSI integration for production workloads.

Enhanced Backup & Disaster Recovery

• Backup improvements provide faster backup creation and restoration with incremental backup support.
• S3 compatibility enhancements expand support for additional object storage backends (MinIO, AWS S3, GCP, Azure).
• Backup scheduling enables automated backup policies with configurable retention and frequency.
• Disaster recovery workflows simplify cross-cluster volume restoration with improved error handling.

Performance Optimizations

1. I/O performance improvements reduce latency and increase throughput for high-performance workloads.
2. Replication enhancements optimize data synchronization between replicas, reducing network overhead.
3. Volume expansion improvements accelerate online volume resizing with better resource management.
4. Snapshot performance optimizations reduce the time required for creating and restoring snapshots.

CSI Integration Enhancements

• Volume snapshot support enables Kubernetes-native snapshot management with VolumeSnapshot CRDs.
• Volume cloning improvements simplify volume duplication with better performance and reliability.
• Storage class enhancements provide more flexible configuration options for different workload requirements.
• Topology awareness ensures volumes are provisioned on nodes with available storage capacity.

Operational Improvements

• UI enhancements provide better visualization of volume health, replica status, and backup operations.
• Monitoring improvements expand Prometheus metrics for comprehensive observability.
• Logging enhancements provide structured logs for better troubleshooting and audit trails.
• Documentation expansion includes detailed guides for common operations and troubleshooting scenarios.

Reliability & Stability

• Replica rebuilding improvements reduce time to recovery after node failures with optimized data reconstruction.
• Data integrity enhancements provide better detection and correction of data corruption.
• Quorum management improvements ensure high availability even during network partitions.
• Error handling refinements provide clearer error messages and automatic recovery from transient failures.

Getting Started

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/longhorn/longhorn/v1.2.0/deploy/longhorn.yaml

Create a StorageClass:

apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: longhorn
provisioner: driver.longhorn.io
allowVolumeExpansion: true
reclaimPolicy: Delete
volumeBindingMode: Immediate
parameters:
  numberOfReplicas: "3"
  staleReplicaTimeout: "30"
  fromBackup: ""

Summary

Longhorn 1.2 continues to mature as a reliable storage solution, providing teams with the confidence to run stateful workloads on Kubernetes with enterprise-grade data protection.