Alluxio Expands Data Access and Security for Data-driven Applications in Heterogeneous Environments with v2.8 Release

Alluxio announced the immediate availability of version 2.8 of its Data Orchestration Platform. This new release features enhanced interface support for the Amazon S3 REST API; security improvements for sensitive applications with strict encryption compliance and regulatory requirements; and strengthened automated data movement functionality across heterogeneous storage systems without the need to manually move or copy the data. 

Alluxio 2.8 enhances S3 API compatibility, so onboarding and managing Alluxio on existing large data pipelines becomes much easier. As a major enhancement to enterprise-grade security, Alluxio 2.8 adds features to support server-side encryption capabilities for securing and governing data. Data migration is a major challenge for organizations having data stored cross-vendors, cross-clouds, or cross-regions. Alluxio 2.8 improves reliability of data movement across heterogeneous storage systems with enhanced usability of policy-based data management and high availability.

“At Uber, we run Alluxio to accelerate all sorts of business-critical analytics queries at a large scale,” said Chen Liang, Senior Software Engineer, Uber’s interactive analytics team. “Alluxio provides consistent performance in our big data processing use cases. As compute-storage separation continues to be the trend along with containerization in big data, we believe a unified layer that bridges the compute and storage like Alluxio will continue to play a key role.”

“The support for S3 API is significant, making Alluxio much more accessible to a huge number of customers,” said Adit Madan, Director of Product Management, Alluxio. “Together, our rich set of S3, HDFS and POSIX APIs enables true storage-agnostic and multi-cloud deployments. The data migration capabilities further eliminate vendor lock-in and provide organizations with the flexibility to choose whatever they want to run their applications or store their data.”

Alluxio 2.8 Community and Enterprise Edition features new capabilities, including:

Enhanced S3 API with Metadata Tagging

Alluxio 2.8 enhances the support for the S3 RESTful API with metadata tagging capabilities. With S3 API, applications can communicate with Alluxio without a custom driver or any additional configuration. By using S3 API, data-driven applications, end-users, and admins can seamlessly and rapidly onboard Alluxio for new uses. Metadata operations can be achieved through the S3 object and bucket tagging APIs.

Data Encryption for Enterprise-grade Security

The Enterprise Edition of Alluxio 2.8 supports encryption of data in Alluxio managed storage at REST as an essential security feature. In conjunction with SSL, this new feature supports server-side encryption, ensuring data security. Alluxio now offers multiple encryption zones for data it manages to meet the demands of security. Data stored on the Alluxio worker is protected, and decrypted on the server before being sent to a client.

Data Movement Across Heterogeneous Storage Systems

Alluxio 2.8 Enterprise Edition also improves the policy-based data management features, which facilitate data access and movement between heterogeneous storage systems for better performance and lower cost.  Alluxio manages data placement between the different storage systems with predefined policies. With transparent storage options, organizations can choose whichever storage best suits their needs without undergoing complex manual data migrations.

Availability

Free downloads of Alluxio 2.8 open source Community Edition and trials of Alluxio Enterprise Edition are generally available here: https://www.alluxio.io/download/