This initiative demonstrates Rancher’s continued commitment to accelerating enterprise adoption of cloud native technologies.

On October 29, 2019, Rancher Labs (hereinafter referred to as Rancher), the founder of Kubernetes, the most widely used management platform in the industry, announced that CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has officially accepted Longhorn, a container storage solution developed by Rancher, into The CNCF community as its latest Sandbox project.


CNCF currently has 20 sandbox projects. The acceptance of the sandbox project by CNCF fully demonstrates the unique value Longhorn brings to the cloud native ecosystem as a new generation of containerized distributed storage project. Rancher’s donation of Longhorn to CNCF is a testament to Rancher’s consistent vision and commitment to accelerating enterprise adoption of cloud-native technologies. In addition, this is critical to accelerating Kubernetes adoption overall, as persistent storage is an area of great concern for enterprises using containers to manage stateful applications.


As more and more enterprises begin to use containers to manage stateful applications (applications that save the active client data of one session for use in the next), the need for persistent storage is increasing among enterprise users. However, the persistent storage market is still in its infancy, and the complexity of usage and lack of enterprise-level technology capabilities have become key challenges for the development and adoption of this technology. Longhorn provides a simple, lightweight persistent storage solution that is ideal for both containers and Kubernetes, while greatly simplifying user deployment, usage, and administration to help teams better manage stably workloads in Kubernetes.


Liz Rice, chair of CNCF TOC, commented, “Storage is an important area for cloud native, so I am very pleased that Rancher is contributing Longhorn to CNCF. Longhorn’s inclusion as a CNCF sandbox project will greatly accelerate the development and maturity of Kubernetes’ persistent block storage solution.”

Longhorn: Implement persistent storage of Kubernetes cluster


Key features of Longhorn (currently v0.6.2) include:

  • Enterprise level distributed block storage software for Kubernetes
  • Volume snapshots
  • Built-in backup and restore
  • Upgrade in real time without affecting volumes
  • Cross-cluster Dr Volume with defined RTO and PRO
  • Intuitive UI
  • A key to install

Using Longhorn as persistent storage for Kubernetes offers three unique advantages:


  • Simple. Longhorn is much simpler than traditional storage software. With just 40,000 lines of GO code, Longhorn can implement enterprise-class storage capabilities, including the data plane (Longhorn Engine) and the management plane (Longhorn Manager). Longhorn was extremely lightweight, and Rancher built storage technology into the existing Linux operating system, while the speed and capacity of modern storage hardware like SSDS and NVMe greatly simplified the design.
  • Easy to use. Users interact with Longhorn through a clean and intuitive UI that exposes a storage class that makes it easy to configure replication volumes. With a few clicks, you can install and upgrade Longhorn without having to read all the documentation to understand every detail. The Longhorn UI not only visualizes the volumes, but also helps the team better understand the Kubernetes workloads that created the volumes.
  • Built-in multi-cluster backup and disaster recovery. Longhorn protects data on multiple levels. As an enterprise-class distributed storage, Longhorn replicates data synchronously across multiple nodes. Users can create snapshots directly in the primary storage and restore the UI to the previous snapshot. You can also back up snapshots to secondary storage and restore volumes to the same or different cluster. Users can even create asynchronous replicas in other clusters to quickly recover data and applications in the event of a cluster failure.


“The donation of Longhorn to CNCF demonstrates Rancher’s long-term commitment to helping build the broader cloud-native ecosystem, particularly in the Kubernetes community. We are grateful to the thousands of people who have tried Longhorn over the years and provided valuable feedback.” “Longhorn’s inclusion in the CNCF sandbox will increase the visibility and support of the open source community for Longhorn,” said Liang Sheng, co-founder and CEO of Rancher. “Rancher will work with the open source community to help Longhorn grow and mature faster.”

Rancher: Drive enterprise adoption of cloud native technologies


CNCF is part of the Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering and maintaining a vendor-neutral open source ecosystem and promoting cloud native technologies. CNCF’s star projects include Kubernetes, Prometheus and Linkerd. Kubernetes graduated from CNCF in March 2018, becoming the first CNCF graduate project.


CNCF sandbox is an incubator for early stage projects. When a project meets the requirements of sandbox stage and additional requirements of incubation stage, it can enter the incubation stage. To graduate from CNCF, you need to meet more stringent requirements. In addition to the donation of Longhorn to CNCF, Rancher has been in close contact with CNCF since its establishment and is a very important participant and contributor in the cloud native ecosystem.


In November 2017, Rancher Kubernetes was one of the first 32 platforms in the world to receive CNCF Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program certification, Shannon Williams, co-founder of Rancher Labs, is a member of CNCF’s Management Board.


In 2018, Rancher officially released Rancher 2.0, the industry’s first and only unified management of all Kubernetes cluster management platform, is currently the industry’s most widely used Kubernetes management platform.


Subsequently, Rancher conducted a series of explorations and extensions around Kubernetes ecology, It includes the lightweight Kubernetes distribution K3S, the kubernetes-based minimal MicroPaaS platform Rio, the industry’s first Kubernetes operating system k3OS, the cross-cluster network connection project Submariner that supports multiple Kubernetes clusters and Kube Rnetes Cluster provides Longhorn, a cloud-native solution for distributed block storage.


After years of development, Kubernetes has developed into a mature ecosystem. “In my opinion, there is a lot more that can be done around Kubernetes ecology,” Liang said. “My personal focus and Rancher’s focus is still on this direction and will remain so for a long time to come.”


Finally, Liang Sheng emphasized that Rancher is an important contributor and participant in the field of open source container, and will continue to uphold the concept of open source and create excellent products and solutions in the future.

Install now! Enjoy your Longhorn tour


Longhorn if you want to know more information, you can log on to the Longhorn’s official website (https://longhorn.io/) or making project page (https://github.com/longhorn/longhorn).

If you’re using Rancher 2.x, you can find Longhorn in the Rancher APP Catalog and install it in just a few steps.

If you are using other platforms, you can out project page (https://github.com/longhorn/longhorn) through the Helm or directly through YAML listing find Longhorn installation instructions.


Enjoy your Longhorn tour now!