Description

With simple access interfaces and flexible billing models, cloud storage has become an attractive solution to simplify the storage management for both enterprises and individual users. However, traditional file systems with extensive optimizations for local disk-based storage backend can not fully exploit the inherent features of the cloud to obtain desirable performance. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of Coral, a cloud based file system that strikes a balance between performance and monetary cost. Unlike previous studies that treat cloud storage as just a normal backend of existing networked file systems, Coral is designed to address several key issues in optimizing cloud-based file systems such as the data layout, block management, and billing model.