Improving Longhorn Performance With SPDK

Longhorn is a cloud-native distributed block storage solution for Kubernetes, providing an opinionated solution to cover different storage topology, data protection, and data services like snapshots, replication, encryption, backup restore, disaster recovery, etc. The Longhorn team is working on a new data plane backend for block storage to improve performance. SPDK is an open source, high performance development kit for storage applications. Longhorn’s engine component is being rewritten to take advantage of SPDK’s architecture to improve the performance. SPDK will simplify the architecture of Longhorn and make it more scalable. This presentation will go over the new architecture, some preliminary performance data, and areas of future growth. Longhorn was accepted as an incubating project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in November 2021.