Alluxio Reimagines Architecture for Multitenant Environments at Scale
Alluxio 2.9 enhancements include scaling out with tenant-level isolation, simplifying DevOps on Kubernetes, and strengthening the security of S3 API.
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Alluxio, developer of an open source data orchestration platform for data driven workloads, has released version 2.9 of its data orchestration platform. This new release strengthens its position as the key layer between computing engines and storage systems by delivering support for a scalable multitenant architecture with a new cross-environment synchronization feature, enhanced manageability with significant improvements for deploying Alluxio on Kubernetes, and improved security and performance from a strengthened S3 API and POSIX API.
Tenant isolation provides the scale and economic benefits of a multitenant architecture while rigorously preventing different teams from competing for access to shared data lake storage. With the new cross-environment synchronization feature, Alluxio evolves its architecture with significantly improved scalability and manageability, enabling data platform teams to deploy multiple per-tenant Alluxio clusters between computing and storage clusters across any environment, based on workload capacity. Running Alluxio on Kubernetes helps standardize deployment methodologies across cloud, multicloud, hybrid-cloud, and on-premises environments.
This new release introduces the Alluxio operator, which simplifies deploying, configuring, provisioning, and managing multiple Alluxio clusters, reducing DevOps complexity. Alluxio on Kubernetes also makes the data stack portable to any environment, preventing vendor lock-in.
Finally, in Alluxio 2.9, authentication and access policies are now centralized through communications between computing engines and Alluxio via S3 API. Therefore, Alluxio provides a unified security experience across heterogeneous storage either on premises or in the cloud.
Alluxio 2.9 Community and Enterprise Edition features new capabilities, including:
- Multi-Environment cluster synchronization. Alluxio 2.9 introduces the new cross-environment synchronization feature. This feature makes one Alluxio cluster aware of another by automatically syncing the metadata between them. Deploying Alluxio clusters across any environment can achieve tenant-level isolation with the metadata of Alluxio clusters in sync at scale. This feature is particularly useful when adopting satellite architecture with computing clusters segregated across team-level tenants for isolation. With this new feature, multitenant architecture with Alluxio allows the platform to scale out and incorporate new use cases without a central resource bottleneck, ensuring SLAs and simplifying metadata management operations.
- Extended manageability for Kubernetes. Administrators can now deploy and manage Alluxio on Kubernetes easily through the newly introduced Alluxio operator with custom resource definitions (CRD). The operator offers configuration management for deployment, connections to under storage, configuration updates, and uninstallation. Using the Alluxio operator removes the burden of deploying Alluxio on different environments, greatly reduces the amount of manual work, and simplifies DevOps when managing multiple instances of Alluxio.
- Enhanced S3 API security with a better user experience. Alluxio 2.9 strengthens its S3 API providing a unified security model to applications. By adopting the open authentication protocol for S3 API, Alluxio users will be verified before their requests are processed. This new feature allows data platform teams to connect to more advanced identity management systems (such as PingFederate) and leverage single sign-on (SSO) to enhance user experience. With a uniform authentication and authorization model, applications connected to Alluxio are portable across on-premises, hybrid, or multicloud.
Availability
Free downloads of Alluxio 2.9 open source Community Edition and trials of Alluxio Enterprise Edition are immediately available at https://www.alluxio.io/download/