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Pocket: Elastic Ephemeral Storage for Serverless Analytics
;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution
For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.
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Serverless computing platforms are increasingly being used to exploit massive parallelism and fine-grained billing for interactive analytics jobs. A key challenge is exchanging intermediate data efficiently between tasks, as serverless tasks are short-lived and stateless. The systems commonly used to store and exchange intermediate data in serverless jobs today do not meet the performance, cost, and elasticity requirements of interactive analytics applications. We present Pocket, a fast, elastic, fully managed cloud storage service designed for efficient data sharing in serverless analytics applications. To achieve high performance and cost efficiency, Pocket leverages multiple storage technologies, right sizes resource allocations for jobs, and automatically scales cluster resources based on utilization. The system achieves similar performance to Redis, an in-memory datastore, while offering automatic, fine-grained scaling and significantly lower cost for serverless analytics jobs. Pocket is open source software.
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