5 Selecting the storage layer
This chapter covers
- Storage performance, security, and integrity requirements
- Block and object storage architectures
- Parquet and the S3 API as foundational standards
- Storage solutions such as HDFS, MinIO, and Everpure
The storage layer is the foundation of any Apache Iceberg lakehouse. While tools for ingestion, cataloging, and querying often receive attention for their immediate impact on user experience, the storage layer ultimately determines the platform’s reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency. Get it wrong, and you’ll face performance bottlenecks, security gaps, and operational complexity. Get it right, and you’ll gain flexibility, lower costs, and future-proof integrations.
Building on the requirements surfaced in your audit, this chapter will help you shape your storage strategy. We’ll revisit the key requirements: performance, security, integrity, and cost. Then we’ll look at the two main lakehouse storage approaches—block storage and object storage—and at how they differ in structure, access patterns, and suitability for Iceberg workloads.
Next, we’ll explore two technical standards that underpin most storage solutions: the Parquet file format and the S3 API. Parquet’s columnar structure makes it ideal for Iceberg’s analytics-oriented workloads. The S3 API has become the lingua franca of object storage, offering broad compatibility and deployment flexibility.