Evolutions and Lessons in Building Cloud Block Store - EBS at Alibaba Cloud

Explore the evolution and key lessons learned in building Alibaba Cloud's Elastic Block Storage (EBS) over the past decade in this award-winning conference talk. Delve into the architectural shifts from EBS1's design simplicity to EBS2's focus on high performance and space efficiency, and finally to EBS3's emphasis on reducing network traffic amplification. Gain insights into achieving high elasticity in latency, throughput, IOPS, and capacity, as well as improving availability by minimizing the impact of various failure events. Examine the motivations and tradeoffs in hardware offloading solutions, and understand why certain promising ideas may not work in practice. Learn from the qualitative and quantitative analysis of design choices and production experiences shared by the Alibaba Group team in this 18-minute presentation from USENIX FAST '24.

FAST '24 - What's the Story in EBS Glory: Evolutions and Lessons in Building Cloud Block Store