Introduction

Alluxio is world’s first open source data orchestration technology for analytics and AI for the cloud. It bridges the gap between data driven applications and storage systems, bringing data from the storage tier closer to the data driven applications and makes it easily accessible enabling applications to connect to numerous storage systems through a common interface. Alluxio’s memory-first tiered architecture enables data access at speeds orders of magnitude faster than existing solutions.

In the data ecosystem, Alluxio lies between data driven applications, such as Apache Spark, Presto, Tensorflow, Apache HBase, Apache Hive, or Apache Flink, and various persistent storage systems, such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, OpenStack Swift, HDFS, GlusterFS, IBM Cleversafe, EMC ECS, Ceph, NFS, Minio, and Alibaba OSS. Alluxio unifies the data stored in these different storage systems, presenting unified client APIs and a global namespace to its upper layer data driven applications.

The Alluxio project originated from (see papers) as the data access layer of the Berkeley Data Analytics Stack (). It is open source under Apache License 2.0. Alluxio is one of the fastest growing open source projects that has attracted more than from over 300 institutions including Alibaba, Alluxio, Baidu, CMU, Google, IBM, Intel, NJU, Red Hat, Tencent, UC Berkeley, and Yahoo.

Today, Alluxio is deployed in production by hundreds of organizations with the largest deployment exceeding 1,500 nodes.

Alluxio helps overcome the obstacles in extracting insight from data by simplifying how applications access their data, regardless of format or location. The benefits of Alluxio include:

Simplified Cloud and Object Storage Adoption: Cloud and object storage systems use different semantics that have performance implications compared to traditional file systems. Common file system operations such as directory listing and renaming often incur significant performance overhead. When accessing data in cloud storage, applications have no node-level locality or cross-application caching. Deploying Alluxio with cloud or object storage mitigates these problems because data will be retrieved from Alluxio instead of the underlying cloud or object storage.
Easy Application Deployment: Alluxio manages communication between applications and file or object storages, translating data access requests from applications into underlying storage interfaces. Alluxio is Hadoop compatible. Existing data analytics applications, such as Spark and MapReduce programs, can run on top of Alluxio without any code change.

Alluxio brings three key areas of innovation together to provide a unique set of capabilities.

Global Namespace: Alluxio serves as a single point of access to multiple independent storage systems regardless of physical location. This provides a unified view of all data sources and a standard interface for applications. See for more details.
Intelligent Multi-tiering Caching: Alluxio clusters act as a read and write cache for data in connected storage systems. Configurable policies automatically optimize data placement for performance and reliability across both memory and disk (SSD/HDD). Caching is transparent to the user and uses buffering to maintain consistency with persistent storage. See Alluxio Storage Management for more details.

To understand more details on Alluxio internals, please read .

To quickly get Alluxio up and running, take a look at our Getting Started page, which explains how to deploy Alluxio and run examples in a local environment.

Also try our getting started tutorial for Presto & Alluxio via:

Released versions of Alluxio are available from the Project Downloads Page. Each release comes with prebuilt binaries compatible with various Hadoop versions. explains how to build the project from source code. Questions can be directed to our User Mailing List (users who can not access the Google Group may use its ) or our Community Slack Channel.