Programming emerging storage interfaces

Block devices, file-systems, and files have for decades served as the fundamental building blocks for the storage application developer.

Emerging NVMe based storage interfaces such as Open-Channel SSDs, Denali, and ZNS promise to deliver tighter latencies, reduced write amplification, and IO isolation. These promises are fulfilled, in part, by moving responsibilities from the device into host software.

Thus, with these emerging storage interfaces comes great power, but also great responsibility, to either recreate the fundamental storage application abstractions as encapsulated by the operating system kernel or manage it explicitly by the storage application developer in user space.

This presentation will provide an introduction to the latter case. That is, which tools, programming libraries and environments are available and how to use them to provide full control of your local storage device.

This talk will be introducing the primary means of operations of emerging storage interfaces and pragmatically show how interact with and program them.

This talk is for the storage application developer that wants to know:

* What are the responsibilities that must be managed by host?
* Which tools and libraries are available to interact with emerging storage devices?
* Hands on tutorial on the setup and configuration of a virtual development and testing environment
* Hands on programming examples