While adoption of the Cloud & Kubernetes has made it exceptionally easy to scale compute, the increasing spread of data across different systems and clouds has created new challenges for data engineers. Effectively accessing data from AWS S3 or on-premises HDFS becomes harder and data locality is also lost – how do you move data to compute workers efficiently, how do you unify data across multiple or remote clouds, and many more. Open source project Alluxio approaches this problem in a new way. It helps elastic compute workloads, such as Apache Spark, realize the true benefits of the cloud while bringing data locality and data accessibility to workloads orchestrated by Kubernetes.
One important performance optimization in Apache Spark is to schedule tasks on nodes with HDFS data nodes locally serving the task input data. However, more users are running Apache Spark natively on Kubernetes where HDFS is not an option. This office hour describes the concept and dataflow with respect to using the stack of Spark/Alluxio in Kubernetes with enhanced data locality even if the storage service is outside or remote.
In this Office Hour we’ll go over:
- Why Spark is able to make a locality-aware schedule when working with Alluxio in K8s environment using the host network
- Why a pod running Alluxio can share data efficiently with a pod running Spark on the same host using domain socket and host path volume
- The roadmap to improve this Spark / Alluxio stack in the context of K8s
ALLUXIO COMMUNITY OFFICE HOUR
While adoption of the Cloud & Kubernetes has made it exceptionally easy to scale compute, the increasing spread of data across different systems and clouds has created new challenges for data engineers. Effectively accessing data from AWS S3 or on-premises HDFS becomes harder and data locality is also lost – how do you move data to compute workers efficiently, how do you unify data across multiple or remote clouds, and many more. Open source project Alluxio approaches this problem in a new way. It helps elastic compute workloads, such as Apache Spark, realize the true benefits of the cloud while bringing data locality and data accessibility to workloads orchestrated by Kubernetes.
One important performance optimization in Apache Spark is to schedule tasks on nodes with HDFS data nodes locally serving the task input data. However, more users are running Apache Spark natively on Kubernetes where HDFS is not an option. This office hour describes the concept and dataflow with respect to using the stack of Spark/Alluxio in Kubernetes with enhanced data locality even if the storage service is outside or remote.
In this Office Hour we’ll go over:
- Why Spark is able to make a locality-aware schedule when working with Alluxio in K8s environment using the host network
- Why a pod running Alluxio can share data efficiently with a pod running Spark on the same host using domain socket and host path volume
- The roadmap to improve this Spark / Alluxio stack in the context of K8s
Video:
Slides:
While adoption of the Cloud & Kubernetes has made it exceptionally easy to scale compute, the increasing spread of data across different systems and clouds has created new challenges for data engineers. Effectively accessing data from AWS S3 or on-premises HDFS becomes harder and data locality is also lost – how do you move data to compute workers efficiently, how do you unify data across multiple or remote clouds, and many more. Open source project Alluxio approaches this problem in a new way. It helps elastic compute workloads, such as Apache Spark, realize the true benefits of the cloud while bringing data locality and data accessibility to workloads orchestrated by Kubernetes.
One important performance optimization in Apache Spark is to schedule tasks on nodes with HDFS data nodes locally serving the task input data. However, more users are running Apache Spark natively on Kubernetes where HDFS is not an option. This office hour describes the concept and dataflow with respect to using the stack of Spark/Alluxio in Kubernetes with enhanced data locality even if the storage service is outside or remote.
In this Office Hour we’ll go over:
- Why Spark is able to make a locality-aware schedule when working with Alluxio in K8s environment using the host network
- Why a pod running Alluxio can share data efficiently with a pod running Spark on the same host using domain socket and host path volume
- The roadmap to improve this Spark / Alluxio stack in the context of K8s
Videos:
Presentation Slides:
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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 caching 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.
Deepseek’s recent announcement of the Fire-flyer File System (3FS) has sparked excitement across the AI infra community, promising a breakthrough in how machine learning models access and process data.
In this webinar, an expert in distributed systems and AI infrastructure will take you inside Deepseek 3FS, the purpose-built file system for handling large files and high-bandwidth workloads. We’ll break down how 3FS optimizes data access and speeds up AI workloads as well as the design tradeoffs made to maximize throughput for AI workloads.
This webinar you’ll learn about how 3FS works under the hood, including:
✅ The system architecture
✅ Core software components
✅ Read/write flows
✅ Data distribution/placement algorithms
✅ Cluster/node management and disaster recovery
Whether you’re an AI researcher, ML engineer, or infrastructure architect, this deep dive will give you the technical insights you need to determine if 3FS is the right solution for you.