Here, There and Everywhere: The Past, the Present and the Future of Local Storage in Cloud

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.