ALLUXIO COMMUNITY OFFICE HOUR
Accessing data to run analytic workloads in Spark across data centers and/or clouds can be challenging. Additionally, network I/O can bottleneck Spark jobs that need to read a large amount of data. A common solution is to deploy an HDFS cluster closer to Spark as a caching layer and manually copy the input data to HDFS first, purging it afterward. But this ETL process can be both time-consuming and also error-prone.
A more efficient and simpler solution is to run Spark on Alluxio as a distributed cache on top of the remote data source. While caching data transparently based on access patterns and storing the working set closer, Alluxio provides Spark jobs much higher I/O throughput with enhanced data locality. In addition, Alluxio also provides data accessibility and abstraction for deployments in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
In this Office Hour, we will go over how to:
- Burst on-prem Spark workloads to the cloud with Alluxio so Spark can seamlessly read from and write to remote data storage
- Use Alluxio as the input/output for Spark applications
- Save and load Spark RDDs and Dataframes with Alluxio
ALLUXIO COMMUNITY OFFICE HOUR
Accessing data to run analytic workloads in Spark across data centers and/or clouds can be challenging. Additionally, network I/O can bottleneck Spark jobs that need to read a large amount of data. A common solution is to deploy an HDFS cluster closer to Spark as a caching layer and manually copy the input data to HDFS first, purging it afterward. But this ETL process can be both time-consuming and also error-prone.
A more efficient and simpler solution is to run Spark on Alluxio as a distributed cache on top of the remote data source. While caching data transparently based on access patterns and storing the working set closer, Alluxio provides Spark jobs much higher I/O throughput with enhanced data locality. In addition, Alluxio also provides data accessibility and abstraction for deployments in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
In this Office Hour, we will go over how to:
- Burst on-prem Spark workloads to the cloud with Alluxio so Spark can seamlessly read from and write to remote data storage
- Use Alluxio as the input/output for Spark applications
- Save and load Spark RDDs and Dataframes with Alluxio
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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.