2025-08-29 –, FORGE (Room 1)
Last May we started with zero lines of code — and today we’ve built a fully S3-compatible object storage system. Powered by SPDK, Exaba runs everywhere from Raspberry Pi to exabyte-scale clusters. This talk shares why we chose Rust, how we tackled SPDK integration, and the lessons from building memory-safe, high-performance storage.
In this talk, I will share our journey of building Exaba, an S3-compatible object storage system written in Rust and built on SPDK.
We began with no Rust experience, but chose it for its memory safety, speed of development, and ability to target architectures from Power to ARM. In under a year, Exaba can run from Raspberry Pis to exabyte-scale clusters, designed to scale both up, down and out. We’ll explain why object storage is at the core of our roadmap and how the architecture ties together control nodes, data nodes, and multi-tenant features.
Along the way, we’ll cover our work adapting SPDK into Rust, building a custom S3 client to handle AWS-scale workloads, and creating a DNS resolver to support parallel multi-part uploads. We’ll also show how we’re ingesting high-velocity video streams using Rust connectors and C SDK bindings.
We’ll finish with a live demo of our cluster and share the key takeaways from building scalable and secure storage in Rust.
