On-Demand Videos
Nilesh Agarwal, Co-founder & CTO at Inferless, shares insights on accelerating LLM inference in the cloud using Alluxio, tackling key bottlenecks like slow model weight loading from S3 and lengthy container startup time. Inferless uses Alluxio as a three-tier cache system that dramatically cuts model load time by 10x.

In this talk, Jingwen Ouyang, Senior Product Manager at Alluxio, will share how Alluxio make it easy to share and manage data from any storage to any compute engine in any environment with high performance and low cost for your model training, model inference, and model distribution workload.

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.
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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
Google Cloud Dataproc is a widely used fully managed Spark and Hadoop service to run big data analytics and compute workloads in the cloud. Services like Dataproc reduce hardware spend, eliminate the need to overbuy capacity, and provide business agility. Yet users still face challenges for performance sensitive workloads or workloads running on remote data.
Alluxio is an open source cloud data orchestration platform that increases performance of analytic workloads running on Dataproc by intelligently caching data and bringing back lost data locality. Alluxio also enables users to run compute workloads against on-prem storage like Hadoop HDFS without any app changes.
Chris Crosbie and Roderick Yao from the Google Dataproc team and Dipti Borkar of Alluxio demo how to set up Google Cloud Dataproc with Alluxio so jobs can seamlessly read from and write to Cloud Storage. They also show how to run Dataproc Spark against a remote HDFS cluster.
If you’re a MapR user, you might have concerns with your existing data stack. Whether it’s the complexity of Hadoop, financial instability and no future MapR product roadmap, or no flexibility when it comes to co-locating storage and compute, MapR may no longer be working for you.
Alluxio can help you migrate to a modern, disaggregated data stack using any object store with the similar performance of Hadoop plus significant cost savings.
Join us for this tech talk where we’ll discuss how to separate your compute and storage on-prem and architect a new data stack that makes your object store the core. We’ll show you how to offload your MapR/HDFS compute to any object store and how to run all of your existing jobs as-is on Alluxio + object store.
ALLUXIO COMMUNITY OFFICE HOUR
Apache Spark has been widely adopted for in-memory data analytics at scale, however, efficient memory utilization is a common challenge, and users will either run out of memory or experience low and unstable performance. Many Spark users may not be aware of the differences in memory utilization between caching data directly in-memory into the Spark JVM versus storing data off-heap via an in-memory storage service like Alluxio. In this office hour, I will highlight the two approaches with a demo and open up for discussions
In this Office Hour we’ll go over:
- How to run Spark shell with Alluxio such that Spark jobs
- A demo to compare the memory usage between Spark cache and using Alluxio as the external off-heap caching service
- Open Session for discussion on any topics such as running Presto on Alluxio, and more
The DBS team was tasked to solve their compute capacity problem. They wanted to provide faster insights and analyze data for a range of use cases but didn’t have the ability to scale compute elastically on-prem.
One use case that challenged them was customer call analysis. With the millions of customer calls they get every year, DBS manages over 50TB of customer data and audio files. This data needed to reside on-prem for compliance reasons. With on-prem compute limitations, they looked to the public cloud to analyze this data and selected “zero-copy” bursting as the best approach.
In this tech talk, we’ll discuss why DBS turned to Alluxio’s bursting approach to help solve these challenges. Vitaliy Baklikov, SVP at DBS, will discuss:
- Challenges and inefficiencies with their prior data stack
- Moving to a disaggregated data stack using Alluxio
- Bursting data without persisting in the cloud
- An overview of Alluxio’s “zero-copy” hybrid bursting solution
tf.data is the recommended API for creating TensorFlow input pipelines and is relied upon by countless external and internal Google users. The API enables you to build complex input pipelines from simple, reusable pieces and makes it possible to handle large amounts of data, different data formats, and perform complex transformations. In this talk, I will present an overview of the project and highlight best practices for creating performant input pipelines.
Apache Iceberg is a new format for tracking very large scale tables that are designed for object stores like S3. This talk will include why Netflix needed to build Iceberg, the project’s high-level design, and will highlight the details that unblock better query performance.
In this keynote, Haoyuan will discuss the key challenges and trends impacting data engineering, and explore the concept of Data Orchestration.
Deep Learning and Gene Computing Acceleration with Alluxio in Kubernetes from Alluxio, Inc.
Alluxio Innovations for Structured Data from Alluxio, Inc.
The Data Flywheel is a comprehensive and additive approach for business and technology leaders to enable organizations to get the most value from their data. In this session, we will share common design patterns AWS customers are applying as part of their Data and AI journey. It will include real world examples. Modern Data Platforms – Thinking Data Flywheel on the Cloud from Alluxio, Inc.
Challenge And Evolution Of Data Orchestration at Rakuten Data System from Alluxio, Inc.