R&D: Evolving Cloud Block Store with Performance, Elasticity, Availability, and Hardware Offloading

ACM Transactions on Storage has published an article written by Erci Xu Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, China, Weidong Zhang Alibaba Group, Beijing, China, Qiuping Wang, Xiaolu Zhang, Yuesheng Gu, Zhenwei Lu,Tao Ouyang, Guanqun Dong, Wenwen Peng, Zhe Xu, Shuo Zhang,Dong Wu, Yilei Peng,Tianyun Wang, Haoran Zhang, Jiasheng Wang, Wenyuan Yan, Yuanyuan Dong, Wenhui Yao, Zhongjie Wu, Lingjun Zhu, Chao Shi, Yinhu Wang, Rong Liu, Junping Wu, Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, China, Jiaji Zhu, Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, China, and Jiesheng Wu, Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, China.

Abstract: “In this paper, we qualitatively and quantitatively discuss the design choices, production experience, and lessons in building the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) at Alibaba Cloud over the past decade. To cope with hardware advancement and users’ demands, we shift our focus from design simplicity in EBS1 to high performance and space efficiency in EBS2, and finally reducing network traffic amplification in EBS3. In addition to the architectural evolutions, we also summarize development lessons and experiences as four topics, including: (i) achieving high elasticity in latency, throughput, IOPS, and capacity; (ii) improving availability by minimizing the blast radius of individual, regional, and global failure events; (iii) identifying the motivations and key tradeoffs in various hardware offloading solutions; and (iv) identifying the pros/cons of alternative solutions and explaining why seemingly promising ideas would not work in practice.“