Longhorn 1.5: Storage Reliability and Performance Excellence

Introduction

Longhorn 1.5, released on September 8, 2023, is most relevant if you run stateful workloads and care about predictable latency and recoverability. You’ll see the impact in storage latency under load, day-2 operations like backups/snapshots, and how quickly you can diagnose volume issues.

Enhanced Backup Capabilities

• Backup scheduling improvements enable more flexible backup policies and schedules.
• Incremental backups reduce backup time and storage requirements.
• Backup encryption provides secure backup storage with encryption at rest.
• Multi-location support enables backup replication across multiple storage backends.

Performance Improvements

1. I/O performance optimizations reduce latency and improve throughput for storage operations.
2. Replication improvements provide faster data replication and recovery.
3. Volume snapshot enhancements reduce snapshot creation time and overhead.
4. Resource usage optimizations reduce CPU and memory footprint.

CSI Integration

• CSI driver improvements provide better compatibility and performance.
• Volume expansion enhancements enable seamless volume size increases.
• Volume cloning improvements provide faster volume duplication.
• Snapshot features enable efficient volume backup and restore operations.

Reliability & Resilience

• Automatic recovery improvements provide faster failure detection and recovery.
• Data integrity enhancements ensure data consistency across replicas.
• Health monitoring improvements provide better visibility into storage health.
• Disaster recovery capabilities enable faster recovery from catastrophic failures.

Getting Started

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/longhorn/longhorn/v1.5.0/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

Summary

Longhorn 1.5 provides teams with enterprise-grade distributed storage with enhanced backup, performance, and reliability features.