Alki, or how we learned to stop worrying and love cold metadata

This post introduces Alki, a new petabyte-scale metadata store designed for cold metadata. It addresses the limitations of Edgestore, particularly its capacity expansion issues and unsuitability for high-volume, cold data like audit logs. Alki employs a two-tier architecture (hot and cold storage) based on LSM tree principles to optimize for different access patterns. The post details the motivations, architecture, and rapid prototyping/productionization of Alki.