Tiered Storage: Designing for Immutable Data

Understand how to design cost-effective tiered storage systems by exploiting immutability properties in timeseries data — and apply the same reasoning to your own architecture decisions

4 sections · 8 lessons

Course outline

Why Tiered Storage?

  1. The hot/cold access problem
  2. What makes timeseries data special

What Immutability Unlocks

  1. Eliminating read fan-out with pre-compaction
  2. Skipping read repair and speculative retry
  3. Reusing existing backup infrastructure

Netflix's Architecture in Practice

  1. Backup Memtable: reading S3 backups as a native cold tier
  2. Separate cold-tier clusters on cheaper hardware

Operational Safeguards

  1. Ensuring cold tier readiness before routing reads

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