Hey Hey, My My, Skewness Is Here to Stay: Challenges and Opportunities in Cloud Block Store Traffic
Haonan Wu, Erci Xu, Ligang Wang, Yin Hong, Changsheng Niu, 博孝 高石, Lingjun Zhu, Jinnian He, Dong Wu, Weidong Zhang, Qiuping Wang, Changhong Wang, Xinqi Chen, Guangtao Xue, Yi‐Chao Chen, Dian Ding · 2025
Elastic Block Storage (EBS) has a pivotal role in modern data center infrastructure, providing reliable, high-performance and flexible block storage service to users. In Alibaba Cloud, EBS is the most widely used service and has been supporting the operation of millions of virtual disks. However, even with layers of load balancing and caching, we still observe significant traffic skewness across the EBS stack. This motivates us to comprehensively investigate symptoms and root causes behind the traffic patterns and, more importantly, explore the fixes for the identified issues.