Guest: Adit Madan (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Company: Alluxio (Twitter)

Alluxio is a data orchestration layer that sits between the different compute engines and storage systems so that the application does not need to worry about where the data is coming from, whether across regions or different cloud providers. Its latest iteration, Alluxio 2.9, has just been rolled out for general availability.

In this episode of TFiR Newsroom, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Adit Madan, Director of Product Management at Alluxio, to discuss the key features of this new release and how companies are looking to avoid vendor lock-in and maximize agility.

Key highlights from this video interview:

• Alluxio created a new layer in the data stack between different compute engines and storage systems. Madan explains that they are seeing good repeatability with the use case they have and over the past two years, the company has seen significant growth.
• Data orchestration sits between different compute engines for different kinds of AI and analytics applications and storage systems. This means that the application does not need to care about where data is coming from, whether from different clouds, regions, or cloud providers.
• Madan tells us that the use cases tend to be around needing a platform to operate across different environments and not be hindered by vendor lock-in. This could be to enable capacity across private data centers, to burst to the cloud for excess capacity, or for cross-cloud access.
• Companies looking to cut costs are using a multi-cloud strategy to prevent vendor lock-in and have maximum agility of using the desired service from the compute or the cloud service product of their choice. Madan explains how Alluxio is helping customers achieve this agility.
• Madan shares the key highlights from Alluxio 2.9: across-environment synchronization which gives a consistent view of data. He discusses that they are now at the stage where multiple Alluxio instances, either in the same environment or across several environments act as one unit.
• Kubernetes can be complex, which is why Alluxio has introduced a Kubernetes operator with custom resource definitions for managing multiple instances of their product across different teams to increase efficiency in people and data.
• Alluxio has further enhanced its S3 API as the API of choice for applications interacting with data in its latest release. Madan explains that it provides onboard authentication using federated ID producers, and a uniform access control model with integrations with plugins like Ranger so the same API can be enforced regardless of the environment.