Products
Tech Talk: How Coupang Leverages Distributed Cache to Accelerate ML Model Training
April 22, 2025
Tuesday April 22, 11am PT

Coupang is a leading e-commerce company in South Korea, with over 50,000 employees and $20+ billion in annual revenue. Coupang's AI platform team builds and manages a large-scale AI platform in AWS for machine learning engineers to train models that enhance and customize product search results and product recommendations for its 100+ million customers.
As the search and recommendation models evolve, optimizing the underlying infrastructure for AI/ML workloads is essential for the e-commerce business. Coupang's platform team actively sought to improve their model training pipeline to boost machine learning engineers' productivity, publish models to production faster, and reduce operational costs.
Coupang focused on addressing several key areas:
- Shortening data preparation and model training time
- Improving GPU utilization in training clusters in different regions
- Reducing S3 API and egress costs incurred from copying large training datasets across regions
- Simplifying the operational complexity of storage system management
In this tech talk, Hyun Jung Baek, Staff Backend Engineer at Coupang, will share best practices for leveraging distributed cache to power search and recommendation model training infrastructure.
Hyun will discuss:
- How Coupang builds a world-class large-scale AI platform for machine learning engineers to deliver better search and recommendation models
- How adding distributed caching to their multi-region AI infrastructure improves GPU utilization, accelerates end-to-end training time, and significantly reduces cross-region data transfer costs.
- How to simplify platform operations and to easily deploy the same architecture to new GPU clusters.
About the Speaker
Hyun Jung Baek is a Staff Backend Engineer at Coupang.
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Events
Bridging Speed and Scale: AWS S3 Data Caching for Low-Latency, Semantically-Rich AI Workloads

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.
Product Update: Alluxio AI 3.7 Now with Sub-Millisecond Latency!

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
