Data and storage for AI workloads: the bottleneck nobody sees
This is the second post in the series where I translate AI into the language of infrastructure engineers. In the first post, I showed that AI is just another workload and that your infra skills already prepare you more than you think. Now for the bottleneck everyone ignores: storage. It is the hidden villain behind performance problems in almost every AI project I’ve seen. tl;dr Storage is usually the first bottleneck in AI training. Keep durable data in Blob or Data Lake, but cache the active working set on local NVMe. Check GPU, disk, and network metrics together before blaming the model or the GPUs. The midnight call You did everything right. The ML team asked for a GPU cluster and you delivered: eight NVIDIA A100s across two nodes, high-bandwidth networking, CUDA drivers up to date. Clean deployment. The team kicked off their first training job Friday at 6 PM and you went home feeling good. ...