We’re delighted to announce the release of Lightbits v3.4.1, the latest milestone from Lightbits Labs. This release introduces a range of new capabilities, improvements, and bug fixes, tailored for both private and public cloud deployments.
The standout feature of this release is Lightbits’ groundbreaking transition to full userspace operation, completely eliminating Linux kernel dependencies for the very first time. We have ported Lightbits kernel code to userspace and optimized it, ensuring every feature functions flawlessly. While v3.4.1 marks the initial public release of Lightbits in userspace, it has undergone rigorous testing on our internal Lightbits production servers for several months. We’re confident in its maturity. Taking advantage of the port to userspace, this release extends compatibility to new distributions, including RHEL 9.2, Alma Linux 9.2, and Rocky Linux 9.2, and makes upgrades simpler and faster.
We’re also thrilled to announce that Lightbits has now made its debut on the Azure marketplace! We’re excited to offer an early preview of our new Azure Managed App Marketplace solution. The Lightbits Azure managed app provides cutting-edge, high-performance, SAN-like storage capabilities within the Azure environment. It guarantees reliability, efficiency, and top-tier storage on Azure, all while significantly reducing your total cost of ownership. This managed app solution comes with unparalleled Lightbits support for your Lightbits on Azure managed app, running in your subscription, managed by Lightbits. To begin your journey with Lightbits on Azure, simply click “subscribe” on the marketplace.
As any cloud operator knows, observability is key to successful operations. This release adds various observability improvements to core Lightbits and to our monitoring stack. To name a few, it has two new dashboards for server performance and volume performance; it significantly improves latency histograms accuracy; it adds a new etcd dashboard for monitoring etcd on Lightbits clusters; and it improves the performance and scalability of the Lightbits metrics exporter, in charge of exporting all metrics from the Lightbits cluster to any monitoring stack. For more details on the latest observability changes and how to upgrade your existing monitoring stack or deploy the latest monitoring stack from Lightbits, see the release notes.
Last but not least, this release offers various other enhancements as well. It resolves an issue related to DCPMM (Intel Optane) detection on specific systems that could generate a sub-optimal system profile. Additionally, it refines placement group handling on larger clusters with single replica volumes, boosting control plane performance. The behavior during server rebuilds has been fine-tuned to prevent rare failure scenarios. Lastly, upgrade behavior has been improved to ensure seamless transitions, even in cases of faulty or misconfigured yum repos.
We invite you to take Lightbits v3.4.1 for a spin and deploy it in your clouds. Your feedback is invaluable as we continue pushing the state of the art in cloud data platforms forward. Rest assured, our team is hard at work on the upcoming Lightbits release, v3.5.1, set to arrive soon. Your support drives our ongoing innovation.
Additional resources:
- Lightbits on the Azure Marketplace
- v3.4.1 release video
- Lightbits on Azure solution brief
- Lightbits on Azure overview
