Liqo 0.4 is out in the wild!

The Liqo team is proud to announce the fourth major release that includes:

• Reduced infrastructure requirements for easier peering. All the Liqo control plane traffic can flow through the Liqo-managed VPN tunnel already established between clusters at the beginning of the peering process. This leads to reduced infrastructure-level requirements and improved security, avoiding the necessity to expose the API Server on the public Internet, while supporting clusters behind NATs and/or firewalls (e.g., at the edge). The entire configuration is supported by a brand new liqoctl connect command.
• Introduce the support for cross-cluster persistent storage. Liqo is able to offload workloads that require persistent volumes, leveraging a custom virtual storage class. It abstracts the creation of the real PVCs in the remote clusters, and it ensures that mounting pods will be scheduled in the appropriate location. Additionally, liqoctl offers the possibility to easily move these volumes to a different cluster, hence facilitating stateful pod migration across clusters.
• Improved UX. Forget about long, hard-to-remember alphanumeric identifiers for remote clusters. A simplified naming system allows to easily correlate nodes and resources with the underlying clusters. Furthermore, new liqoctl commands simplify the interaction with Liqo, providing at the same time richer feedback to the user.

Take a look at the source code on GitHub.

Curious about our next steps? Check our Roadmap!

The idea for Liqo grew from a struggle we had at our University

We had plenty of powerful computers in our labs, but there were always some students complaining about their laptops not being powerful enough to run their jobs.

Our idea was straightforward: let’s transform our labs, including student laptops, into opportunistic data centers, so that heavy tasks can always be executed on the best resource among those available.

However, students didn’t want to give up the control of their laptops nor compromise in security. Here is where Liqo comes in: a way to share resources and services, while each user retains the full control on his/her box, whether it is the lab IT admin or the student, deciding what to share, how much, with whom. Controlled, secure sharing.

While working on this project, we realized that the capability to share Kubernetes clusters has much greater implications. Liqo can not only solve our student’s problems but also become the enabler for applications that rely on the democratization of edge computing such as Autonomous driving, IoT, Industry 4.0, Smart cities.

In fact, Liqo allows to run services on multiple clusters without even having to provision, build and operate your own distributed edge infrastructure. This project could optimize utilization of currently available resources and kickstart a first scale up of edge computing.