Cooperative caching for object storage

Data is increasingly stored in data lakes, vast immutable object stores that can be accessed from anywhere in the data center. By providing low cost and scalable storage, today immutable object-storage based data lakes are used by a wide range of applications with diverse access patterns. Unfortunately, performance can suffer for applications that do not match the access patterns for which the data lake was designed. Moreover, in many of today's (non-hyperscale) data centers, limited bisectional bandwidth will limit data lake performance. Today many computer clusters integrate caches both to address the mismatch between application performance requirements and the capabilities of the shared data lake, and to reduce the demand on the data center network. However, per-cluster caching; i) means the expensive cache resources cannot be shifted between clusters based on demand, ii) makes sharing expensive because data accessed by multiple clusters is independently cached by each of them, and iii) makes it difficult for clusters to grow and shrink if their servers are being used to cache storage. In this dissertation, we present two novel data-center wide cooperative cache architectures, Datacenter-Data-Delivery Network (D3N) and Directory-Based Datacenter-Data-Delivery Network (D4N) that are designed to be part of the data lake itself rather than part of the computer clusters that use it. D3N and D4N distribute caches across the data center to enable data sharing and elasticity of cache resources where requests are transparently directed to nearby cache nodes. They dynamically adapt to changes in access patterns and accelerate workloads while providing the same consistency, trust, availability, and resilience guarantees as the underlying data lake. We nd that exploiting the immutability of object stores significantly reduces the complexity and provides opportunities for cache management strategies that were not feasible for previous cooperative cache systems for le or block-based storage. D3N is a multi-layer cooperative cache that targets workloads with large read-only datasets like big data analytics. It is designed to be easily integrated into existing data lakes with only limited support for write caching of intermediate data, and avoiding any global state by, for example, using consistent hashing for locating blocks and making all caching decisions based purely on local information. Our prototype is performant enough to fully exploit the (5 GB/s read) SSDs and (40, Gbit/s) NICs in our system and improve the runtime of realistic workloads by up to 3x. The simplicity of D3N has enabled us, in collaboration with industry partners, to upstream the two-layer version of D3N into the existing code base of the Ceph object store as a new experimental feature, making it available to the many data lakes around the world based on Ceph. D4N is a directory-based cooperative cache that provides a reliable write tier and a distributed directory that maintains a global state. It explores the use of global state to implement more sophisticated cache management policies and enables application-specific tuning of caching policies to support a wider range of applications than D3N. In contrast to previous cache systems that implement their own mechanism for maintaining dirty data redundantly, D4N re-uses the existing data lake (Ceph) software for implementing a write tier and exploits the semantics of immutable objects to move aged objects to the shared data lake. This design greatly reduces the barrier to adoption and enables D4N to take advantage of sophisticated data lake features such as erasure coding. We demonstrate that D4N is performant enough to saturate the bandwidth of the SSDs, and it automatically adapts replication to the working set of the demands and outperforms the state of art cluster cache Alluxio. While it will be substantially more complicated to integrate the D4N prototype into production quality code that can be adopted by the community, these results are compelling enough that our partners are starting that effort. D3N and D4N demonstrate that cooperative caching techniques, originally designed for file systems, can be employed to integrate caching into today’s immutable object-based data lakes. We find that the properties of immutable object storage greatly simplify the adoption of these techniques, and enable integration of caching in a fashion that enables re-use of existing battle tested software; greatly reducing the barrier of adoption. In integrating the caching in the data lake, and not the compute cluster, this research opens the door to efficient data center wide sharing of data and resources