Random Short Take #50

Happy new year and welcome to Random Short Take #50. Sure, it seems like I’ve done a lot of these recently, and they should probably be newsletters, not blog posts. But whatever. A few players have worn 50 in the NBA including father and son Greg and Cole Anthony. My pick is David Robinson though. Let’s get random.

  • I was interested to read about the Pi 400 when it was first announced, so it was good to be able to read Preston’s review of the device here. There’s also a useful initial impressions post here.
  • Scale Computing recently announced profitability, and this article from Chris Evans digs a little deeper into what that all means.
  • The good folks at Backblaze recently published a roundup of its hard drive stats for 2020 and it makes for some interesting reading. Notably, Backblaze now has 162530 spinning drives and 3000 boot drives in service, and over 3000 “pods” in service now.
  • Speaking of data protection, Zerto announced some good news from the Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice. You can read more about that here. I’m a big fan of Zerto, and I’d like to see the company successfully navigate whatever is gong on with it at the moment.
  • I’m a fan of Rancher, and Longhorn, and thought this news item on what Longhorn is doing at the edge was pretty neat.
  • Working with VMware Cloud Foundation and need to do some bundle updates offline? This article might be helpful.
  • The Ringer recently published a list of 50 best cult movies that you can read here. Gleaming the Cube was notable for its absence, but these things can’t always be 100% correct.
  • I was fortunate enough to attend Storage Field Day 21 recently. I’ll be sharing some thoughts on that over the next few weeks, but in the meantime you can read Georgina’s wrap-up of the event here.

Rancher Labs Announces Longhorn General Availability

This happened a little while ago, and the news about Rancher Labs has shifted to Suse’s announcement regarding its intent to acquire Rancher Labs. Nonetheless, I had a chance to speak to Sheng Liang (Co-founder and CEO) about Longhorn’s general availability, and thought I’d share some thoughts here.

 

What Is It?

Described by Rancher Labs as “an enterprise-grade, cloud-native container storage solution”, Longhorn has been in development for around 6 years, in beta for a year, and is now generally available. It’s comprised of around 40k lines of Golang code, and each volume is a set of independent micro-services, orchestrated by Kubernetes.

Liang described this to me as “enterprise-grade distributed block storage for K8S”, and the features certainly seem to line up with those expectations. There’s support for:

  • Thin-provisioning, snapshots, backup, and restore
  • Non-disruptive volume expansion
  • Cross-cluster disaster recovery volume with defined RTO and RPO
  • Live upgrade of Longhorn software without impacting running volumes
  • Full-featured Kubernetes CLI integration and standalone UI

From a licensing perspective, Longhorn is free to download and use, and customers looking for support can purchase a premium support model with the same SLAs provided through Rancher Support Services. There are no licensing fees, and node-based subscription pricing keeps costs to a minimum.

Use Cases

Why would you use it?

  • Bare metal workloads
  • Edge persistent
  • Geo-replicated storage for Amazon EKS
  • Application backup and disaster recovery

 

Thoughts

One of the barriers to entry when moving from traditional infrastructure to cloud-native is that concepts seem slightly different to the comfortable slippers you may have been used to in enterprise infrastructure land. The neat thing about Longhorn is that it leverages a lot of the same concepts you’ll see in traditional storage deployments to deliver resilient and scalable persistent storage for Kubernetes.

This doesn’t mean that Rancher Labs is trying to compete with traditional storage vendors like Pure Storage and NetApp when it comes to delivering persistent storage for cloud workloads. Liang acknowledges that these shops can offer more storage features than Longhorn can. There seems to be nonetheless a requirement for this kind of accessible and robust solution. Plus it’s 100% open source.

Rancher Labs already has a good story to tell when it comes to making Kubernetes management a whole lot simpler. The addition of Longhorn simply improves that story further. If you’re feeling curious about Longhorn and would like to know more, this website has a lot of useful information.