Will you still feed me when ARM64? You bet, says SUSE’s Rancher Labs

SUSE yesterday announced the release of Longhorn 1.1, the Kubernetes persistent storage platform built by its subsidiary Rancher Labs. The upgrade includes support for ARM64 and edge deployments, and extra performance and management goodies.

Rancher Labs teamed up with Arm to create a Kubernetes platform for low-powered IoT, edge, and data centre server nodes. “Longhorn is the first Kubernetes-native storage solution to support edge deployments, allowing DevOps teams to manage persistent data volumes from core to cloud to edge,” a SUSE spokesperson told us via email.

Rancher Labs is best known for its open source multi-cluster container orchestration software. This management tool includes the Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) distribution but can manage any certified Kubernetes distribution.

Rancher has ported RKE and RancherOS to Arm Neoverse servers. Rancher Labs has also upgraded Rancher 2.1 to manage mixed x86 and ARM64 nodes via a single Rancher server. In other words, users can run x86 clusters in the data centre and Arm clusters on the edge.

The Longhorn 1.1 goodie bag includes…

  • Ability to manage container data volumes in any Kubernetes environment
  • Self-healing capabilities
  • “ReadWriteMany” support so it can write data across multiple containers
  • Prometheus systems and service monitoring support
  • CSI snapshotting
  • Data Locality to keep a storage replica local to the workload itself, ensuring that, even if the node temporarily loses network connectivity, access to storage will never be lost.