Introducing Lightbits Cluster Federation
If you look at the left side of the diagram below, you’ll recognize a familiar headache.
As your data grows, you add more block storage clusters. But without a unified layer, your applications—whether they are Kubernetes, OpenStack, or bare metal hypervisors—have to maintain complex, direct connections to every single cluster. It’s a tangled web of dependencies that doesn’t scale. You end up with “islands” of storage where one cluster might be full while another sits empty, forcing your team to balance workloads manually.
Enter Lightbits Cluster Federation (CF).
As shown on the right side of the diagram, Cluster Federation transforms this chaotic mesh into a streamlined hub-and-spoke architecture. It introduces a centralized global control plane that acts as a provisioning broker for your entire fleet.
Here is how it changes the game for your operations:
1. The “Single Pane” Reality. Instead of your human operators or Kubernetes clusters needing to know about Cluster A, B, or C, they simply talk to the Federation. It provides a single, unified interface for fleet-wide management, meaning you can scale your backend infrastructure without ever changing how your applications connect.
2. Automated “Intelligent Placement” The biggest win? You stop guessing where to put data. CF V1.0 employs intelligent policy-driven provisioning. When you request a new volume, the Federation automatically analyzes the capacity across all attached clusters and places the volume on the cluster with the lowest provisioned ratio. It balances the load for you, instantly.
3. Resilience Built-In This isn’t just a passthrough; it’s a fault-tolerant service. The Federation maintains a persistent state of your clusters and actively polls them to ensure data consistency. Even if the service restarts, it picks up right where it left off, ensuring your “Global Control Plane” is always aware of the ground truth.
The Bottom Line Scale shouldn’t mean complexity. As the diagram illustrates, moving from a decentralized mesh to a federated control plane allows you to treat your storage not as a collection of boxes, but as a unified, flexible service.