Kangaroo: Caching Billions of Tiny Objects on Flash

This week’s paper, Kangaroo: Caching Billions of Tiny Objects on Flash, won a best paper award at SOSP. It describes a system that uses both flash and memory to cheaply and efficiently cache data at scale.

Previous academic and industry research demonstrates significant cost savings (around a factor of 10!) from hybrid memory/flash caches, existing systems don't solve for the unique issues faced when caching billions of small objects (like tweets, social graphs, or data from Internet of Things devices).

To solve challenges faced by earlier designs, Kangaroo synthesizes previously distinct ideas for cache systems with several novel techniques for increasing cache hit rate.

The paper is best enjoyed on my blog.

Discussion on Hacker News and Twitter.

As always feel free to reach out with feedback by responding to this email!

Until next time,

Micah