SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Jeff Terrace
Senior Staff Software Engineer
Google
Jeff Terrace is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, where he has worked on Google Cloud Storage for the past 12 years. He is a tech lead for GCS's Serving Frontend team, which maintains GCS's XML compatibility API. Prior to coming to Google, he earned his PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University where he studied distributed systems. He currently lives and works from his home in Massachusetts.
Related Sessions
Blending Objects and Files in Google Cloud Storage
Cloud object storage systems have been built to satisfy simple storage workloads where traditional POSIX semantics are sacrificed for simplicity and scalability. With AI and analytics workloads migrating towards hyperscale cloud computing, object storage users are increasingly requesting file-oriented access to their data. In this presentation, we will discuss how Google Cloud Storage has approached bridging the gap between object-oriented and file-oriented storage to provide the optimal foundation for a scalable and performant data lakehouse which has been validated for both GPUs and TPUs at >60,000 accelerator scale, within both the Pytorch and JAX frameworks.
Google Cloud Storage has recently launched several features to bring file-oriented features to object storage at cloud scale:
* Hierarchical Namespace for directory-style bucket structure and access patterns, including atomic rename of folders and faster I/O ramping.
* Managed Folders allows for managing access control grants at the folder/prefix level.
* Rapid Storage brings stateful handle-based filesystem protocols to object storage, sub-millisecond latencies for random reads and writes, and low-latency appends.
* Cloud Storage FUSE implements the fuse filesystem interface, allowing file-oriented clients to view Cloud Storage buckets as a filesystem
* A gRPC endpoint for Cloud Storage enables new features, including binary transfers, http/2 bidirectional streaming, and dynamic routing.
We will present the technical details of each of these features and how they work together to bring file-like performance and semantics to Cloud Storage.
Featured Presentation: SNIA Cloud Object Storage Plugfest Update (Community Driven S3 Compatibility Testing)
SNIA's Cloud Object Storage community organized and hosted the industry first open multi-vendor compatibility testing (Plugfest) at SDC’24, in Santa Clara, CA. Most of the participants focused on their S3 server and client implementations. Community driven testing revealed significant areas to collaborate, including ambiguities among protocol options, access control mechanisms, missing or incorrect response headers, unsupported API calls and unexpected behavior (as well as sharing best practices and fixes). The success of this event led to community demand for more Cloud Object Storage Plugfests at subsequent SDC events in Denver (April 2025) and Silicon Valley (Sept. 2025). Register here to join the Denver April ’25 Plugfest: https://www.snia.org/forums/csti/plugfests
SNIA Cloud Object Storage Plugfest participants will discuss real-world issues hampering interoperability among various S3 implementations, from both server and client perspectives.
