The Unwritten Contract of Cloud-based Elastic Solid-State Drives

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Yingjia, Yang, Ming-Chang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Yingjia
Yang, Ming-Chang
author_facet Wang, Yingjia
Yang, Ming-Chang
contents Elastic block storage (EBS) with the storage-compute disaggregated architecture stands as a pivotal piece in today's cloud. EBS furnishes users with storage capabilities through the elastic solid-state drive (ESSD). Nevertheless, despite the widespread integration into cloud services, the absence of a thorough ESSD performance characterization raises critical doubt: when more and more services are shifted onto the cloud, can ESSD satisfactorily substitute the storage responsibilities of the local SSD and offer comparable performance? In this paper, we for the first time target this question by characterizing two ESSDs from Amazon AWS and Alibaba Cloud. We present an unwritten contract of cloud-based ESSDs, encapsulating four observations and five implications for cloud storage users. Specifically, the observations are counter-intuitive and contrary to the conventional perceptions of what one would expect from the local SSD. The implications we hope could guide users in revisiting the designs of their deployed cloud software, i.e., harnessing the distinct characteristics of ESSDs for better system performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_17372
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Unwritten Contract of Cloud-based Elastic Solid-State Drives
Wang, Yingjia
Yang, Ming-Chang
Performance
Emerging Technologies
Elastic block storage (EBS) with the storage-compute disaggregated architecture stands as a pivotal piece in today's cloud. EBS furnishes users with storage capabilities through the elastic solid-state drive (ESSD). Nevertheless, despite the widespread integration into cloud services, the absence of a thorough ESSD performance characterization raises critical doubt: when more and more services are shifted onto the cloud, can ESSD satisfactorily substitute the storage responsibilities of the local SSD and offer comparable performance? In this paper, we for the first time target this question by characterizing two ESSDs from Amazon AWS and Alibaba Cloud. We present an unwritten contract of cloud-based ESSDs, encapsulating four observations and five implications for cloud storage users. Specifically, the observations are counter-intuitive and contrary to the conventional perceptions of what one would expect from the local SSD. The implications we hope could guide users in revisiting the designs of their deployed cloud software, i.e., harnessing the distinct characteristics of ESSDs for better system performance.
title The Unwritten Contract of Cloud-based Elastic Solid-State Drives
topic Performance
Emerging Technologies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17372