Workload-aware storage policies for cloud object storage

Abstract

Different applications have different access characteristics and various performance requirements. Thus, the shared cloud object store entails providing tenant-specific policies. However, the limited configurability of existing storage policies makes it difficult to provide efficient and flexible policies to meet tenants' evolving needs. First, existing policies that only control request forwarding cannot provide sufficient optimizations for workload performance. Second, those policies lack the flexibility to adapt to the possible workload changes during runtime. In this paper, we propose Mass, a programmable framework to provide the enhanced storage policies for diverse workloads based on their access characteristics. We also design its enhancements, C-Mass, extending Mass's capabilities through container-based policy deployment to efficiently handle workload changes. Compared with existing storage policies, the latency and throughput of workloads under Mass are improved by up to 81.6% and 231.5%, respectively. Further, the workload performance under C-Mass is optimized by up to 40%.