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
Speaker:
Jingwen Ouyang is a Senior Product Manager at Alluxio with over 10 years of diverse data experience. Previously, she has worked as a Data Engineer at Meta and SanDisk. Jingwen received her BS and MS of EECS from MIT. She’s also a proud mom of her 2-year-old border collie, a certified snowboard instructor, and has a strong passion for basketball.
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Join us to learn about the latest release of Alluxio Enterprise AI. In this webinar, discover how Alluxio AI 3.7 eliminates cloud storage latency bottlenecks with breakthrough sub-millisecond performance, delivering up to 45× faster data access than S3 Standard without changing your code. Alluxio AI 3.7 is also packed with new features designed to supercharge your AI infrastructure while keeping your data secure.
Key highlights include:
- Alluxio Ultra Low Latency Caching for Cloud Storage
- Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for S3 Access
- 5X Faster Cache Preloading with Alluxio Distributed Cache Preloader
- FUSE Non-Disruptive Upgrade
- Other New Features for Alluxio Admins
Storing data as Parquet files on cloud object storage, such as AWS S3, has become prevalent not only for large-scale data lakes but also as lightweight feature stores for training and inference, or as document stores for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However, querying petabyte-to-exabyte-scale data lakes directly from S3 remains notoriously slow, with latencies typically ranging from hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds.
In this webinar, David Zhu, Software Engineering Manager at Alluxio, will present the results of a joint collaboration between Alluxio and a leading SaaS and data infrastructure enterprise that explored leveraging Alluxio as a high-performance caching and acceleration layer atop AWS S3 for ultra-fast querying of Parquet files at PB scale.
David will share:
- How Alluxio delivers sub-millisecond Time-to-First-Byte (TTFB) for Parquet queries, comparable to S3 Express One Zone, without requiring specialized hardware, data format changes, or data migration from your existing data lake.
- The architecture that enables Alluxio’s throughput to scale linearly with cluster size, achieving one million queries per second on a modest 50-node deployment, surpassing S3 Express single-account throughput by 50x without latency degradation.
- Specifics on how Alluxio offloads partial Parquet read operations and reduces overhead, enabling direct, ultra-low-latency point queries in hundreds of microseconds and achieving a 1,000x performance gain over traditional S3 querying methods.
Speaker: David Zhu
David Zhu is a Software Engineer Manager at Alluxio. At Alluxio, David focuses on metadata management and end-to-end performance benchmarking and optimizations. Prior to that, David completed his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, with a focus on distributed data management systems and operating systems for the data center. David also holds a Bachelor of Software Engineering from the University of Waterloo.