Recently, the 24th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '26) convened in Santa Clara, California, USA. The paper “Here, There and Everywhere: The Past, the Present and the Future of Local Storage in Cloud”, a collaborative effort by Alibaba Cloud, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Solidigm, secured the prestigious Best Paper Award. Globally, only two papers were bestowed with this accolade at the conference. Notably, this achievement marks the third time in the past four years that Alibaba Cloud’s storage research has been recognized with this top international academic honor, underscoring China’s sustained leadership in innovation within the cloud storage infrastructure domain.

The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the “three generations of evolution” in storage architecture, progressing from pure software optimization to software-hardware synergy. It introduces the next-generation hybrid architecture, Latte, which seamlessly integrates the ultra-responsive nature of local storage with the boundless scalability of the cloud. This integration dramatically boosts response speed and resource utilization through intelligent scheduling, efficient caching strategies, and flexible disaster recovery mechanisms.

In today’s landscape, where AI large model inference has emerged as a mainstream workload, the significance of the Latte architecture becomes even more apparent. It facilitates the creation of a high-performance, large-capacity, and cost-effective elastic caching layer, effectively mitigating the bottleneck of GPUs waiting for sluggish data retrieval.

The transition from Espresso to Latte not only signifies a transformation in storage paradigms but also mirrors the broader shift in underlying cloud computing architecture from “resource silos” to “pooled integration.” With this accomplishment, Alibaba Cloud showcases to the industry how to harness the technological benefits of software-hardware collaboration and local-cloud fusion to establish a more robust foundation for cloud-native databases, AI inference, and big data analytics, propelling global storage technology towards a new era of intelligence.