Erci Xu

Cloud vendors offer diverse infrastructure services by flexibly allocating resources, such as compute, storage, and networking, across virtual machines. However, memory allocation is still less flexible: the vendors allocate memory capacity in a fixed ratio to virtual CPUs and provide no mechanis...

Large Language Model (LLM) inference services in production operate under stringent, fine-grained Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Unlike throughput-oriented LLM training, even sporadic performance anomalies during inference can violate SLOs, underscoring the need for improved tracing and diagnos...

RedNote (a.k.a., Xiaohongshu, a global-scale social network platform) widely adopts approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) to power its search, recommendation, and advertising services. Due to the demanding Service Level Agreements (SLAs), we have to rely on in-memory graph-based ANNS (i.e.,...

Observability is crucial for diagnosing and troubleshooting cloud systems as they grow in scale and complexity. However, telemetry data are often stored and processed in siloed systems, leading to high latency, redundant data movement, and low operational efficiency. To address these challenges,...

Cloud local storage has been a popular service among many vendors thanks to its near-physical performance and affordable price. In this paper, we revisit the evolution of the cloud local storage at Alibaba Cloud. We systematically analyze and evaluate the motivations, architectures and pros/cons...

In cloud block store, indexing is on the critical path of I/O operations and typically resides in memory. With the scaling of users and the emergence of denser storage media, the index has become a primary memory consumer, causing memory strain. Our extensive analysis of production traces reveals...

Efficient cloud computing relies on high-performance Elastic Block Storage (EBS) services, where virtual disk (VD) image loading significantly affects user experience. While the commonly used "lazy loading" approach reduces cold-start time from minutes to sub-seconds, our trace analysis of around...

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) enable users to run sensitive applications in private memory regions. SGX-PFS is the state-of-the-art secure storage solution for TEEs that ensures data confidentiality, integrity, freshness, and consistency (CIFC). Unfortunately, SGX-PFS uses Merkle Hash Tre...