Distributed storage systems are the foundational layer of any big data stack. There are a variety of implementations which support different specialized use cases and come with associated tradeoffs. Alluxio is a distributed virtual filesystem which integrates with multiple persistent storage systems to provide a scalable, in-memory storage layer for scaling computational workloads independent of the size of your data. In this episode Bin Fan explains how he got involved with the project, how it is implemented, and the use cases that it is particularly well suited for. If your storage and compute layers are too tightly coupled and you want to scale them independently then Alluxio is the tool for the job.