Longhorn 1.4: Storage Reliability and Performance

Introduction

Longhorn 1.4, released on July 25, 2022, builds on previous releases with significant improvements to storage reliability, backup capabilities, and performance. This release strengthens Longhorn’s position as a production-ready distributed storage solution for Kubernetes clusters.

This release is most relevant in day‑2 operations—when you’re upgrading, scaling, or troubleshooting in real clusters. The goal is the same: fewer surprises and more predictable behavior under load.

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.
• 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.

Getting Started

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/longhorn/longhorn/v1.4.0/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"

Summary

Longhorn 1.4 continues to mature as a reliable storage solution, providing teams with the confidence to run stateful workloads on Kubernetes with enterprise-grade data protection.