Alluxio (formerly Tachyon): The journey thus far and the Road Ahead

Alluxio, formerly Tachyon, is an open-source memory-speed virtual distributed storage system. The Alluxio open source community is one of the fastest growing open source communities in big data history with more than 300 developers from over 100 organizations around the world. The Alluxio system has been deployed at a number of companies, including Alibaba, Baidu, Barclays, Intel, Huawei, and Qunar. In some of these deployments, Alluxio has been running in production for over a year, managing petabytes of data. In the past year, the Alluxio project experienced significant improvement in performance and scalability and was extended with key new features including tiered storage, transparent naming, and unified namespace. At the same time, the Alluxio ecosystem has expanded to include support for more under storage systems and computation frameworks. In particular, Alluxio now supports a wide range of under storage systems, including Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Gluster, Ceph, HDFS, NFS, and OpenStack Swift. These integrations make it possible for Alluxio to be leveraged in many different environments. This year, our goal is to make Alluxio accessible to an even wider set of users, through our focus on security, new language bindings, and further increased stability. In addition, we are working on new APIs to allow applications to access data more efficiently and to manage data across different under storage systems.