Alluxio Boosts Data Connectivity For Business Analytics, AI Tasks

Alluxio is expanding the data integration capabilities of its multi-cloud/hybrid cloud data management platform, boosting the system’s data pipelines for business analytics and machine learning applications.

The new 2.5 Community and Enterprise editions of the Alluxio Data Orchestration Platform are notable for supporting POSIX and S3 APIs, boosting the system’s performance and expanding its connectivity beyond HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System).

“With hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud, data is increasingly remote from the compute,” said Haoyuan Li, Alluxio founder and CEO, in an interview with CRN.

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Alluxio’s software provides a way to unify access to data scattered across widely distributed environments, making all data appear local no matter where it is stored and making data management tasks more efficient.

More recently customers have been running data workloads on the Alluxio platform, Li said, driving demand for the expanded API support in release 2.5. The new release introduces a new Java Native Interface-based FUSE integration to support POSIX data access. The release also improves S3 API data access and allows administrators to manage Alluxio through a standard object storage console using an S3 Northbound API.

The expanded API support allows Alluxio users to accelerate data pipelines for business analytics and machine learning model training – the latter using machine learning frameworks such as Tensorflow and PyTorch.

The 2.5 release also offers improved connectivity with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. The Azure support in the 2.5 release comes via a new Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2 connector while also providing a native Google Cloud Storage connector. And the S3 connector in Alluxio 2.5 now supports Amazon’s Security Token Service – AWS’s recommended authentication paradigm.

Li said the new capabilities in the 2.5 release will help solution provider and systems integrator partners speed up big data integration projects that include the Alluxio software. “This is enabling more workloads to run on top of Alluxio,” he said.

Aulluxio is also making it easier for partners and customers to deploy and configure multi-data center and hybrid-cloud environments. The new Hybrid Cloud Quickstart provides support for the Alluxion Data Orchestration Hub on Kubernetes to aid cluster configuration and connectivity across private data centers and private clouds.