SwiftAnalytics: Optimizing object storage for big data analytics

Abstract

Due to their scalability and low cost, object-based storage systems are an attractive storage solution and widely deployed. To gain valuable insight from the data residing in object storage but avoid expensive copying to a distributed filesystem (e.g. HDFS), it would be natural to directly use them as a storage backend for data-parallel analytics frameworks such as Spark or MapReduce. Unfortunately, executing data-parallel frameworks on object storage exhibits severe performance problems, reducing average job completion times by up to 6.5x. We identify the two most severe performance problems when running data-parallel frameworks on the OpenStack Swift object storage system in comparison to the HDFS distributed filesystem: (i) the fixed mapping of object names to storage nodes prevents local writes and adds delay when objects are renamed, (ii) the coarser granularity of objects compared to blocks reduces data locality during reads. We propose the SwiftAnalytics object storage system to address them: (i) it uses locality-aware writes to control an object's location and eliminate unnecessary I/O related to renames during job completion, speeding up analytics jobs by up to 5.1x, (ii) it transparently chunks objects into smaller sized parts to improve data-locality, leading to up to 3.4x faster reads.