Tom--yes, that all sounds right to me. Great answers. It's quite remarkable that they can do this when you consider the implications. It's easy to see how it's done on the network, as they can allocated bandwidth with a fixed usage guarantee and a known capacity on the link. What is mystifying is how it is possible for the physical infrastructure of the volumes to support this, as the the amount of work they do is highly variable depending on specific workload. Whatever is behind the volumes is clearly not your grandpa's NAS, as it can flatten out huge random demand peaks from many users. ... View more

Tom--thanks for the reply. With regard to the EBS, yes-all the nodes in question are EBS optimized. The critical question is, do ALL those optimized instances share a single 10Gb network to the EBS hosts? As near as I can tell empirically, as the number of writers or readers increases, the total throughput approaches a limit of about 1/3 of a 10Gb network asymptotically. No matter how many readers or writers, that's the limit. The docs are clear that "optimized" puts a node's EBS on a different LAN but do not seem to indicate whether that alternate network is also 10Gb/sec. Or possibly there is some fancier topology with multiple alternate LANs, etc. The same general behavior happens with S3, but with the limit about 105MB/sec. instead of 350MB/sec. It takes about 8 or 10 threads to hit the limit. Individual readers never go over about 12MB/sec. My numbers are consistent with benchmarks that I've found online, including the asymptotic thing. But I don't think that can really be the limit--Netflix claims they query a petabyte of S3 daily. It would have to be a very long day! ... View more

This brings up an issue. When the S3->S3 moves occur, does the data move across the local LAN link or does this occur entirely within the S3 infrastructure. I.e., if you copy, a NAS-backed file on a server it is read in across the LAN and then written out again. S3 isn't a NAS in that sense--but is this what it does, or does S3 move the data around on its own networks when the move is S3-S3? This matters because network is probably our limiting resource with our query types. @Rajesh Balamohan ... View more

Thanks. That's what I thought---it's negligible in HDFS but not always trivial in S3 because it's a copy+delete. Interesting idea about using distcp to transfer the data. Not sure if that would actually help with EBS backing HDFS but it's worth a try. ... View more

I feared as much. Thank you for your suggestion--I think it work for us, as this is a cloud cluster, and we can archive to S3, obviating the need to use heterogeneous storage for its intended purpose. However, I would like to suggest a Jira ticket to add a storage class for this purpose. There are significant use-cases where it would be useful to know that a subset of your data is confined to specific drives (a) without the restrictions of the existing policies (b) without abusing a storage class for this purpose. ... View more