Alluxio has announced the immediate availability of version 2.9 of its Data Orchestration Platform. According to the company, this new release strengthens its position as the key layer between compute engines and storage systems by delivering support for a scale-out, multi-tenant architecture with a new cross-environment synchronization feature, enhanced manageability with significant improvement in the tooling and guidelines for deploying Alluxio on Kubernetes, and improved security and performance with a strengthened S3 API and POSIX API.

Alluxio 2.9 Community and Enterprise Edition features new capabilities, including multi-environment cluster synchronization, extended manageability for Kubernetes as well as enhanced S3 API security with better user experience.

The latest version introduces the new cross-environment synchronization feature. This feature makes one Alluxio cluster aware of another Alluxio cluster by automatically syncing the metadata between Alluxio clusters. Deploying Alluxio clusters across any environment can achieve tenant-level isolation with the metadata of Alluxio clusters in sync at scale. This feature is particularly useful when adopting satellite architecture with compute clusters segregated across team-level tenants for isolation. With this new feature, multi-tenant architecture with Alluxio allows the platform to scale out and onboard new use cases without a central resource bottleneck, ensuring SLAs and simplifying metadata management operations.

The new Alluxio 2.9 has added the Alluxio operator for Kubernetes. Administrators can now deploy and manage Alluxio on Kubernetes easily through the newly introduced Alluxio operator with CRD (custom resource definitions). The operator offers configuration management for deployment, connections to under storage, configuration updates, and uninstallation. Using the Alluxio operator removes the burden of deploying Alluxio on different environments, greatly reduces the amount of manual work and simplifies DevOps when managing multiple instances of Alluxio.

Alluxio 2.9 further strengthens its S3 API providing a unified security model to applications with better user experience. By adopting the open authentication protocol for S3 API, Alluxio users will be verified before their requests are processed. This new feature allows data platform teams to connect to more advanced identity management systems (such as PingFederate) and leverage Single-Sign on (SSO) to enhance user experience. With a uniform authentication and authorization model, applications connected to Alluxio are portable across on-premises, hybrid or multi-cloud.

Free downloads of Alluxio 2.9 open source Community Edition and trials of Alluxio Enterprise Edition are available now.