Cloud Drive Benefits

Introduction

SeaweedFS provides two mechanisms to use cloud storage:

1. SeaweedFS Cloud Drive (<== You are here)
   • in this case, you can mount an S3 bucket to the Seaweedfs file system (in the filer), and access the remote files through SeaweedFS. Effectively, SeaweedFS caches the files from the cloud storage.
   • In this mode, the file structure in cloud store is exactly matching the SeaweedFS structure - so every file in SeaweedFS will also become a file in the cloud storage provider.
   • This is useful in case you want to use the files inside the cloud provider's infrastructure.
   • However, this does not support file encryption in any way (obviously), as the files are put to Cloud Storage as is.
2. Tiered Storage with Cloud Tier
   • In this mode, seaweedFS moves full volume files to the cloud storage provider, so files which are 1 GB (in our case) big.
   • This mode supports Filer Data Encryption transparently.
   • The chunk files uploaded to the cloud provider are not usable outside of SeaweedFS.

Cloud is not for everyone

Nowadays, the industrial trend is to go to cloud storage, since "everybody is doing it". But after really using cloud storage, many users will find out:

• The cloud cost is too high. On AWS S3, the storage cost is relatively cheap (but not really) around $0.023 per GB per month. But accessing your own data is not cheap:
  • API cost for PUT, POST, LIST requests is $0.005 per 1000 requests
  • Transfer out cost is $0.09 per GB.
• The network latency is high and not consistent.
• Any code changes may increase your total cost.
• It limits engineers' creativity and development speed in order to watch for cost.

SeaweedFS can be a good choice

SeaweedFS can be good because:

• Freedom to read your own data! Any times that you want!
• Freedom to develop new features with fixed cost.
• Free to use faster high-capacity storage hardware.
• Local access latency.
• Avoid noisy neighbor problem.
• Cross data center replication gives high data redundancy and availability.

However, how to make SeaweedFS work with data already on cloud?

Design

Benefits

• Minimum Transfer Cost
  • Download existing data only once.
  • Updates are uploaded for free.
• Cached Locally
  • Fast metadata operations.
  • Fast read and write at local network latency and throughput.
  • Fast and cheaper hardware.
  • Avoid noisy neighbors.
• Scalable Capacity
  • Just cache everything.
  • No cache churn.
• Easy To Manage
  • Warm up cache for by folder, file name pattern, file size, file age, etc.
  • Uncache by folder, file name pattern, file size, file age, etc.
  • Optionally write data back to cloud storage.
  • One system for both remote storage cache and local storage.
• Flexible
  • Work with existing cloud ecosystems.
  • Can transparently switch to different cloud storage vendors.
  • Can detach from the cloud storage if decided to move off cloud.

What SeaweedFS Cloud Drive is not?

• It is not a proxy. Proxy is not ideal for low-latency read or write operations.
• Its cache size is not limited. With unlimited size, all file content can be localized. So the read can be fast even on the first attempt, without worrying cached items are evicted due to capacity.
• Its cache is not write-through, which is slower than write-back. Usually local changes are asynchronously write back to the cloud within seconds.
• It does not change file storage layout in the cloud storage. So other tools can access the files on the cloud storage as usual.
• It does not need to link to the original cloud storage. After caching all the file content, you can choose to detach from the cloud storage.

Why SeaweedFS Cloud Drive?

There are other products also cache S3 data. What makes SeaweedFS Cloud Drive better?

SeaweedFS Cloud Drive has these unique characteristics:

• No change to existing workflow
  • No directory or file format changes on cloud storage.
• Scalable Capacity
  • Easy to add more capacity.
  • Disaggregated storage.
  • Tiered storages with NVME/SSD/HDD.
• Easy to manage
  • With unlimited capacity, no complicated caching strategy. Data can be fast on first read.
  • No unexpected cache evictions.
  • Can explicitly cache or uncache files by folder, name pattern, size, age, etc.
• Flexible
  • Mounted folders can become normal folders. Just stop writing back to the cloud.
  • Transparently move data between vendors.

Possible Use Cases

Machine learning

• Problem
  • Training jobs need to repeatedly visit a large set of files.
  • The randomized access pattern is hard for caching.
• With SeaweedFS Cloud Drive
  • Users can explicitly ask SeaweedFS Cloud Drive to cache one whole folder.
  • Increase training speed and reduce API cost and network cost.
  • Users can access data with FUSE mounted folders.

Data Hoarding

• Problem
  • Local storage is not reliable enough.
  • With cloud capacity, reliability, and storage tiering, saving data files there may be a good idea.
  • Accessing cloud data is slow and costly.
  • Recently uploaded files very likely need to be accessed again.
• With SeaweedFS Cloud Drive
  • The local copy and remote copy can be backup for each other, if users choose not to uncache.
  • To keep recent data in local copy, users can choose to only uncache files older than a limit.

Big Data

• Problem
  • Run MapReduce, Spark, and Flink jobs on cloud data is slow due to metadata operations.
  • Repeated data access increases unnecessary cost.
  • May need to work with the cloud ecosystem.
• With SeaweedFS Cloud Drive
  • Avoiding slow cloud storage metadata access.
  • Access data only once.
  • Write back data to work with cloud ecosystems.

Cloud Storage Vendor Agnostic

• Problem
  • Different datasets may need to be on different vendors, based on access pattern, latency, cost, etc.
• With SeaweedFS Cloud Drive
  • Transparently switch to from one vendor to another.

Switch S3 Compatible Storage Vendors

• Problem
  • Other S3 compatible vendors are known to have lesser flexibility, scalability and performance as SeaweedFS.
• With SeaweedFS Cloud Drive
  • Compare SeaweedFS with the vendor over a long period of time.
  • Transparently switch away if SeaweedFS works better.

Move Off Cloud

• Problem
  • Cloud storage is costly!
• With SeaweedFS Cloud Drive
  • Help to transition between on-cloud to off-cloud.
  • When you are happy with it, just stop the write back process (and cancel the monthly payment to the cloud vendor!).

Support multiple access methods.

• Problem
  • You may need to access cloud data by HDFS, or HTTP, or S3 API, or WebDav, or FUSE Mount.
• With SeaweedFS Cloud Drive
  • Multiple ways to access remote storage.