Database School Infinite, shareable volume storage with Hunter Leath, Archil CEO
4 snips
Jan 15, 2026 
Hunter Leath, CEO of Archil, discusses their innovative universal storage engine that transforms S3 into a fast, POSIX-compatible disk. He dives into the challenges of state management between S3 and block storage and explains how their SSD-backed layers enhance performance. Hunter shares insights on optimizing small file handling, custom protocol benefits, and multi-cloud capabilities while revealing the trade-offs in their storage approach. From AI use cases to Git performance, his vision showcases a leap in cloud storage technology.
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Custom Protocol To Fix Small-File Pain
- Small-file workloads cause many protocols to choke on round-trip latency and S3 request costs.
- Archil built a custom protocol optimized for small-file writes to avoid per-file round trips.
Writes Real Files To Your S3 Bucket
- Archil writes real object files into your S3 bucket, not opaque packed blobs.
- This preserves compatibility with CDNs, Object Lambda, and other S3-native tools.
Opt Out To Keep Hot Data On SSDs
- If S3 throttling becomes limiting, toggle directories to remain on SSDs permanently.
- Use Archil's queuing and tuned S3 clients to avoid hitting S3 limits by default.