Vineyard: Optimizing Data Sharing in Data-Intensive Analytics

Modern data analytics and AI jobs become increasingly complex and involve multiple tasks performed on specialized systems. Sharing of intermediate data between different systems is often a significant bottleneck in such jobs. When the intermediate data is large, it is mostly exchanged through files in standard formats (e.g., CSV and ORC), causing high I/O and (de)serialization overheads. To solve these problems, we develop Vineyard, a high-performance, extensible, and cloud-native object store, trying to provide an intuitive experience for users to share data across systems in complex real-life workflows. Since different systems usually work on data structures (e.g., dataframes, graphs, hashmaps) with similar interfaces, and their computation logic is often loosely-coupled with how such interfaces are implemented over specific memory layouts, it enables Vineyard to conduct data sharing efficiently at a high level via memory mapping and method sharing. Vineyard provides an IDL named VCDL to facilitate users to register their own intermediate data types into Vineyard such that objects of the registered types can then be efficiently shared across systems in a polyglot workflow. As a cloud-native system, Vineyard is designed to work closely with Kubernetes, as well as achieve fault-tolerance and high performance in production environments. Evaluations on real-life datasets and data analytics jobs show that the above optimizations of Vineyard can significantly improve the end-to-end performance of data analytics jobs, by reducing their data-sharing time up to 68.4x.