
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.

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.
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Fireworks AI is a leading inference cloud provider for Generative AI, powering real-time inference and fine-tuning services for customers' applications that require minimal latency, high throughput, and high concurrency. Their GPU infrastructure spans 10+ clouds and 15+ regions, serving enterprises and developers deploying production AI workloads at scale.
With model sizes reaching 70GB+, Fireworks AI faced critical challenges: eliminating cold start delays, managing highly concurrent model downloads across GPU clusters, reducing tens of thousands in annual cloud egress costs, and automating manual pipeline management that consumed 4+ hours weekly. They chose Alluxio as their solution to scale with their hyper-growth without requiring dedicated infrastructure resources.
In this tech talk, Akram Bawayah, Software Engineer at Fireworks AI, and Bin Fan, VP of Technology at Alluxio, share how Fireworks AI uses Alluxio to power their multi-cloud inference infrastructure.
They discuss:
- How Fireworks AI uses Alluxio in its high-performance model distribution system to deliver fast, reliable inference across multiple clouds
- How implementing Alluxio distributed caching achieved 1TB/s+ model deployment throughput, reducing model loading from hours to minutes while significantly cutting cloud egress costs
- How to simplify infrastructure operations and seamlessly scale model distribution across multi-cloud GPU environments

