Objcache: An Elastic Filesystem over External Persistent Storage for Container Clusters
Takeshi Yoshimura, Tatsuhiro Chiba, Sunyanan Choochotkaew, Seetharami, Seelam, Hui-fang Wen, Jonas Pfefferle

TL;DR
Objcache is an elastic filesystem designed for container clusters that efficiently manages caching over external storage, significantly reducing startup times and supporting scalable, fault-tolerant AI workloads.
Contribution
It introduces a novel transaction protocol over Raft for consistent distributed cache management and supports elastic scaling down to zero with automatic eviction.
Findings
Speeded up model serving startup by 98.9%
Managed scaling with up to 1024 dirty files in seconds
Enabled elastic scaling down to zero with automatic eviction
Abstract
Container virtualization enables emerging AI workloads such as model serving, highly parallelized training, machine learning pipelines, and so on, to be easily scaled on demand on the elastic cloud infrastructure. Particularly, AI workloads require persistent storage to store data such as training inputs, models, and checkpoints. An external storage system like cloud object storage is a common choice because of its elasticity and scalability. To mitigate access latency to external storage, caching at a local filesystem is an essential technique. However, building local caches on scaling clusters must cope with explosive disk usage, redundant networking, and unexpected failures. We propose objcache, an elastic filesystem over external storage. Objcache introduces an internal transaction protocol over Raft logging to enable atomic updates of distributed persistent states with consistent…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsCaching and Content Delivery · Cloud Computing and Resource Management · Advanced Data Storage Technologies
