Uber builds one of the biggest data lakes in the industry, which stores exabytes of data. In this talk, we will introduce the evolution of our data storage architecture, and delve into multiple key initiatives during the past several years.
Specifically, we will introduce:
- Our on-prem HDFS cluster scalability challenges and how we solved them
- Our efficiency optimizations that significantly reduced the storage overhead and unit cost without compromising reliability and performance
- The challenges we are facing during the ongoing Cloud migration and our solutions
Uber builds one of the biggest data lakes in the industry, which stores exabytes of data. In this talk, we will introduce the evolution of our data storage architecture, and delve into multiple key initiatives during the past several years.
Specifically, we will introduce:
- Our on-prem HDFS cluster scalability challenges and how we solved them
- Our efficiency optimizations that significantly reduced the storage overhead and unit cost without compromising reliability and performance
- The challenges we are facing during the ongoing Cloud migration and our solutions
Video:
Presentation slides:
Videos:
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Videos
Amazon S3 and other cloud object stores have become the de facto storage system for organizations large and small. And it’s no wonder why. Cloud object stores deliver unprecedented flexibility with unlimited capacity that scales on demand and ensures data durability out-of-the-box at unbeatable prices.
Yet as workloads shift toward real-time AI, inference, feature stores, and agentic memory systems, S3’s latency and limited semantics begin to show their limits. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to augment — rather than replace — S3 with a tiered architecture that restores sub-millisecond performance, richer semantics, and high throughput — all while preserving S3’s advantages of low-cost capacity, durability, and operational simplicity.
We’ll walk through:
- The key challenges posed by latency-sensitive, semantically rich workloads (e.g. feature stores, RAG pipelines, write-ahead logs)
- Why “just upgrading storage” isn’t sufficient — the bottlenecks in metadata, object access latency, and write semantics
- How Alluxio transparently layers on top of S3 to provide ultra-low latency caching, append semantics, and zero data migration with both FSx-style POSIX access and S3 API access
- Real-world results: achieving sub-ms TTFB, 90%+ GPU utilization in ML training, 80X faster feature store query response times, and dramatic cost savings from reduced S3 operations
- Trade-offs, deployment patterns, and best practices for integrating this tiered approach in your AI/analytics stack
Pratik Mishra delivered insights on architecting scalable, deployable, and resilient AI infrastructure at scale. His discussion on fault tolerance, checkpoint optimization, and the democratization of AI compute through AMD's open ecosystem resonated strongly with the challenges teams face in production ML deployments.
In this talk, Bin Fan, VP of Technology at Alluxio, presents on building tiered architectures that bring sub-millisecond latency to S3-based workloads. The comparison showing Alluxio's 45x performance improvement over S3 Standard and 5x over S3 Express One Zone demonstrated the critical role the performance & caching layer plays in modern AI infrastructure.