Leping Yang, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Yanbo Zhou, Gong Zeng, Li Zhang, Saisai Zhang, Ruilin Wu, Chaoyang Sun, Shiyi Luo, Wenrui Li, Keqiang Niu, Xiaolu Zhang, Junping Wu, Jiaji Zhu, and Jiesheng Wu, Alibaba Group; Mariusz Barczak and Wayne Gao, Solidigm; Ruiming Lu, Erci Xu, and Guangtao Xue, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Awarded Best Paper!
Cloud local storage has been a popular service among many vendors thanks to its near-physical performance and affordable price. In this paper, we revisit the evolution of the cloud local storage at Alibaba Cloud. We systematically analyze and evaluate the motivations, architectures and pros/cons of different methodologies from user space stack to hardware offloading. We also explore the future of local storage including a hybrid solution by integrating Elastic Block Storage to achieve better performance, availability and cost efficiency.
FAST '26 Open Access Sponsored by
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author = {Leping Yang and Yanbo Zhou and Gong Zeng and Li Zhang and Saisai Zhang and Ruilin Wu and Chaoyang Sun and Shiyi Luo and Wenrui Li and Keqiang Niu and Xiaolu Zhang and Junping Wu and Jiaji Zhu and Jiesheng Wu and Mariusz Barczak and Wayne Gao and Ruiming Lu and Erci Xu and Guangtao Xue},
title = {Here, There and Everywhere: The Past, the Present and the Future of Local Storage in Cloud},
booktitle = {24th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 26)},
year = {2026},
isbn = {978-1-939133-53-3},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
pages = {1--17},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast26/presentation/yang},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = feb
}
