Amazon Lightsail vs. Longhorn Block Storage

It is best suited for the small applications which do not need much CPU powers to executes tasks and when integration with other AWS services but it is less suited for the applications which need very frequent auto scaling for the performance purpose, as AWS Lightsail did not support system downgrading so not recommend to use in this case.

Incentivized

Longhorn Block Storage is well suited for most Kubernetes workloads where data storage is required, but when very high storage speed is essential, Longhorn Block Storage might not be the best solution. For those rare situations, we use local storage mounts. Longhorn Block Storage's ability to easily create/restore volume snapshots is a very frequently used feature among our dev teams because they can easily play multiple scenarios with the same data - modify data, restore it and modify it again.

• Value instances packages
• Better organized UI
• Easy billing resulting in higher efficiency
• Cheaper than competition
• Better support staff
• Can adjust for any bills you may have incurred by accident

Incentivized

• Creates read-write many (RWX) volumes
• Longhorn Block Storage is an easy to deploy solution
• Scheduled and on-demand volume snapshots can be created using web GUI
• Volume backups can be stored offsite on any S3 compatible storage solution
• Backups and snapshots can be restored using web GUI

• Lack of flexibility in terms of configuration
• Customer service tiers - have to pay more for better service
• Usage not shown in obvious place

Incentivized

• ReadWriteMany Longhorn volumes are still using NFS (file-based) protocol in the core.
• Using iSCSI as main protocol instead of FC ties Longhorn to Ethernet-based LAN which is in most architectures much slower that FC-based SAN.
• Longhorn could implement S3 as alternative access protocol to its volumes.
• Backups, and snapshots configuration could be configured at each volume-level by administrators (maybe from additional CRD object?), because currently is configured at storage-class level which is not granular enough.

My overall experience with Amazon Lightsail is very good, and the online community of Lightsail users is very large and its helps to resolve any kind of issue i faced on my server. I also like the integration of other AWS services with Amazon Lightsail like we can export our Lightsail instance into ec2 server using snapshots.

Incentivized

Longhorn is mature software defined storage solution that is still developed and receive new functionalities. From the beginning every Longhorn volume have multiple (at least two) replicas, can leverage manual or automatic snapshots and backup to external S3 volume. Longhorn provides nice and clear GUI for administrators, but also can be managed from CLI.

Amazon Lightsail is ideal for beginners looking for a low-cost VPS to try out new things. It's especially useful if you're at a hackathon and need a quick way to prototype a quick idea. I would never recommend Lightsail for any kind of production work. In terms of uptime, Lightsail has proved unreliable. Occasionally, the instance will simply crash or reboot at random. Without warning, Amazon will perform maintenance on your Lightsail instance. Lightsail's networking is likewise lacking, with no support for IPv6.

Incentivized

GlusterFS was first Persistent Storage solution used in our Kubernetes-based clusters. It is file-based what in some usages led us to many data corruptions. CEPH is object-based persistent storage which can be used as file-based Persistent Storage in Kubernetes. It is also is much more resource-hungry than other solutions including Longhorn. Dell PowerScale (or Isilon) is a hardware-software solution, that provides volumes that can be accessed by file-based NFS and CIFS protocols. Recently was added access to its volumes with object-based S3 protocol. Longhorn is in the middle. It is block-based, it is build on industry standards like iSCSI, performs very well on 10Gbit or faster LAN and commodity hardware (or in virtual machines)

• Hosting a production application on Lightsail will guarantee you a loss
• Saved lots of time for our prototyping
• Other VPS providers are better

Incentivized

• Longhorn is fully open source. One can try and/or use Longhorn for free even in enterprise and buy subscriptions only for environments that must be fully supported. We started with Longhorn in our lab environment and followed on through reference platform to non-production and production environments.
• Longhorn subscriptions are not cheap, but its biggest advantage is that price-to-functionality ratio is very reasonable.
• We have volumes with hundreds of gigabytes of data and these on Longhorn perform well in solutions where file-based GlusterFS volumes were corrupting data.