Longhorn – A Kubernetes-Native Filesystem

(vegard.blog.engen.priv.no)

28 points | by jandeboevrie 4 days ago ago

15 comments

  • positisop an hour ago

    Longhorn is a poorly implemented distributed storage layer. You are better off with Ceph.

    • willbeddow 14 minutes ago

      have not used longhorn, but we are currently in the process of migrating off of ceph after an extremely painful relationship with it. Ceph has fundamental design flaws (like the way it handles subtree pinning) that, IMO, make more modern distributed filesystems very useful. SeaweedFS is also cool, and for high performance use cases, weka is expensive but good.

      • q3k 9 minutes ago

        That sounds more like a CephFS issue than a Ceph issue.

        (a lot of us distrust distributed 'POSIX-like' filesystems for good reasons)

    • yupyupyups an hour ago

      I've heard Ceph is expensive to run. But maybe that's not true?

      • keeperofdakeys 39 minutes ago

        Ceph overheads aren't that large for a small cluster, but they grow as you add more hosts, drives, and more storage. Probably the main gotcha is that you're (ideally) writing your data three times on different machines, which is going to lead to a large overhead compared with local storage.

        Most resource requirements for Ceph assume you're going for a decently sized cluster, not something homelab sized.

      • jauntywundrkind an hour ago

        I'm only just wading in, after years of intent. I don't feel like Ceph is particularly demanding. It does want a decent amount of ram. 1GB each for monitor, manager, and metadata, up to 16GB total for larger clusters, according to docs. But then each disk's OSD defaults to 4gb, which can add up fast!! And some users can use more. 10Gbe is recommended and more is better here but that seems not unique to ceph: syncing storage will want bandwidth. https://docs.ceph.com/en/octopus/start/hardware-recommendati...

  • cmeacham98 2 hours ago

    I tried longhorn on my homelab cluster. I'll admit it's possible that I did something wrong, but I managed to somehow get it into a state where it seemed my volumes got permanently corrupted. At the very least I couldn't figure out how to get my volumes working again.

    When restoring from backup I went with Rook (which is a wrapper on ceph) instead and it's been much more stable, even able to recover (albeit with some manual intervention needed) from a total node hardware failure.

  • dilyevsky 2 hours ago

    Anyone knows what's the story with NVMEoF/SPDK support these days? A couple years ago Mayastor/OpenEBS was running laps around Longhorn on every performance metrics big time, not sure if anything changed there...

  • coopreme 2 hours ago

    Go with Ceph… a little more of a learning curve but overall better.

  • d3Xt3r 4 days ago

    Longhorn was the codename for Windows Vista... so not a great choice of a name (IMO).

    • gdbsjjdn an hour ago

      I did this was going to be about the Vista and how some of the FS stuff that got cut was prescient. "This old thing that didn't work was ahead of its' time" is a whole genre of post (ex. Itanium)

    • onionisafruit 2 hours ago

      Longhorn is a fine name, and it doesn't matter if somebody else used it 20+ years ago

      • weinzierl an hour ago

        By that logic Titanic would be a fine name too.

      • fineallaround 2 hours ago

        As a codename, no less. 0-0

        What a stupid thing to complain about.

    • tracker1 2 hours ago

      I remembered the Windows Vista reference as soon as I saw the name. That said, I don't think it's a big deal.