Reduce bandwidth costs with dm-cache: fast local SSD caching for network storage

8 months ago

AWS bandwidth costs were reduced by 95% using dm-cache for local SSD caching.
Ceph-based storage in multiple AWS availability zones led to high inter-AZ traffic costs.
Local SSDs were repurposed as read caches for network-based Ceph storage.
Implemented dm-cache with LVM partitioning, read-only caching, and container integration.
Dm-cache leverages temporal locality to cache frequently accessed data locally.
Write-through mode was chosen to ensure data integrity for e-commerce applications.
Cache sizing, write policy, and performance monitoring were key implementation considerations.
Results included 95% reduction in read traffic, 30x IOPS improvement, and 50% latency reduction.
Small 512MB caches proved highly effective for containerized applications.

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