April 2026 meeting is virtual only

A Distributed Rename Protocol for Strongly Consistent Object Metadata Across Independent Storage Cells

Speakers

Amber Rastogi
jmercier@ieee.org

Amber Rastogi is a senior software engineer with over 12 years of experience building and operating large-scale cloud infrastructure. He specializes in distributed systems and object storage, with a focus on designing strongly consistent metadata operations across highly sharded environments. His work includes leading the development of fault-tolerant rename and metadata workflows deployed in production at cloud scale, supporting systems running across thousands of machines. He has previously worked on high-throughput backend services, reliability engineering, and performance optimization for globally deployed platforms

Presentation

URL TBD

Recording

URL TBD

Event Description

Cloud object storage systems achieve scalability and fault isolation by sharding metadata across independently managed domains. While most metadata operations naturally scale under this model, rename remains a fundamental challenge, as it requires atomicity and strong consistency across multiple metadata owners. This challenge is exacerbated when source and destination metadata reside in different shards, operate without shared storage, and cannot depend on global locks or global clocks.

This talk presents the design of a distributed rename protocol for cloud-scale object storage systems, enabling atomic renames across independent metadata domains. The protocol models rename as a recoverable, multi-stage state machine rather than a monolithic transaction. It relies on explicit transaction tracking, shard-local invariants, and idempotent transitions, allowing failures and concurrent operations to safely drive in-progress renames toward completion or abort without centralized coordination.

Registration

https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/550647