As more and more enterprises look to cloud storage to meet their data storage needs at a lower cost of operation, this issue is of important practical significance. In this paper, Puttaswamy et al. address cost-effective cloud storage. They propose a frugal cloud file system (FCFS), a storage management application designed to reduce operating costs in the cloud. Specific comparisons are made to Amazon’s Elastic Block Store (EBS), Simple Storage Service (S3), and ElastiCache, which represent of a variety of cloud storage options. The major tradeoff is between storage and access costs. Dynamically managing this tradeoff with products that emphasize one factor or the other offers significant overall cost savings.

The first section provides a conceptual introduction, a summary of related work, and the authors’ view of what this paper contributes to the field. Subsequent sections provide a motivating framework for dynamic storage; a careful description of FCFS; cost optimization algorithms, including cost analysis; experimental design and the nature of the real-life traces used; an evaluation of the results; and concluding thoughts. Twelve figures, three tables, and pseudocode for block reads in FCFS effectively complement the text.

The paper is interesting and insightful within the constraints noted by the authors. It will be interesting to see whether significant contributions based on actual implementations are made to the literature on cloud storage, since such a report tends to become a postmortem after the technology moves forward and the older technology has lost its proprietary advantage.