Database School Infinite, shareable volume storage with Hunter Leath, Archil CEO
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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State Management Is The Core Problem
- Developers face a state-management gap: cheap, shared S3 vs fast, attached block storage.
- Archil bridges them by caching on SSD clusters and syncing back to users' S3 buckets.
Mount S3 With A FUSE Client
- Install Archil's FUSE-based client to mount S3 as a POSIX file system.
- Let their shared SSD cluster cache actively-used files and asynchronously persist them to S3.
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.