- Alluxio provides a data caching layer for analytics frameworks like Spark running on AWS EMR, addressing challenges of using S3 directly like inconsistent performance and expensive metadata operations.
- It mounts S3 as a unified filesystem and caches frequently used data in memory across workers for faster queries while continuously syncing data to S3.
- Alluxio's multi-tier storage enables data to be accessed locally from remote locations like S3 using intelligent policies to promote and demote data between memory, SSDs and disks.