Linstor, ready for Kubernetes

The recent session with LINBIT during The IT Press Tour was good as we had time to dig into LINBIT’s Kubernetes strategy essentially covered by Linstor, a dedicated storage solution for Kubernetes. As the DNA of the company, the product is open source under the GPL license and goes beyond Kubernetes also supporting OpenNebula, OpenStack and OpenShift but it is above all a generic storage volume management for Linux. It’s obvious that the product targets persistent volume for stateful workloads.

The architecture resides on multiple services with active/passive manager named the Linstor controller, one active at a time, and a series of agent, called Linstor Satellite, deployed on each node in the cluster under the controller management. The Linstor Controller is managed via API or CLI. Linstor also integrates DRBD for data resiliency at the block level.

For Kubernetes, Linstor exposes CSI and LINBIT also develops an operator named Piraeus with Doacloud. This project is a sandbox CNCF project. As an analogy it plays the same role as Rook for Ceph. Definitely one of the few right storage management service to associate for each Kubernetes cluster deployment.