An experience report on strategies for working with Cloud Storage

The first part will cover how compression, deduplication, and encryption can be interchangeably applied for storing content on Cloud. Cloud storage footprint is in exabytes and exponentially growing and companies pay billions of dollars to store and retrieve data. In this talk, we will cover some of the space and time optimizations, which have historically been applied to on-premise file storage, and how they would be applied to objects stored in Cloud.

Deduplication and compression are techniques that have been traditionally used to reduce the amount of storage used by applications. Data encryption is table stakes for any remote storage offering and today, Netflix has client-side and server-side encryption support by Cloud providers.

Combining compression, encryption, and deduplication for object stores in Cloud is challenging due to the nature of overwrites and versioning, but the right strategy can save millions for an organization. We will cover some strategies for employing these techniques depending on whether an organization prefers client-side or server-side encryption, and discuss online and offline deduplication of objects. Companies such as Box, and Netflix, employ a subset of these techniques to reduce their cloud footprint and provide agility in their cloud operations.

Following this, we will also explore how data availability can be improved for hybrid systems, from 99.9% to 99.99% thereby saving ~$3M for enterprises.