Fisc: A Large-scale Cloud-native-oriented File System

Despite the progress of cloud-native technologies, existing distributed file systems are ill-suited for multi-tenant cloudnative applications for two reasons, First, their clients are typically heavyweight, resulting in a low level of resource multiplexing among containers. Second, their architecture is based on network gateway and falls short in providing efficient, highly-available and scalable I/O services for cloud-native applications. In this paper, we propose Fisc, a large-scale, cloudnative-oriented distributed file system. Fisc introduces three key designs: (1) a lightweight file system client to improve the multiplexing of resources with a two-layer resource aggregation, (2) a storage-aware distributed gateway to improve the performance, availability and scalability of I/O services, and (3) a DPU-based virtio-Fisc device offloading key functions to hardware. Fisc has been deployed in production for over three years and now serves cloud applications running over 3 million cores. Results show that Fisc client only consumes 69% CPU resources compared to the traditional file system client. The production environment shows that the average latency of online searching tasks is less than 500 µs when they access their files in Fisc.