Faster file reads and cheaper storage on a platform serving 700,000+ websites

Context

Pantheon runs Drupal, WordPress and Next.js sites with more than 17 billion monthly page views. Its file-systems layer serves every asset to application containers and the CDN, so it sets the floor on page-render latency and is one of the largest lines in infrastructure cost.

The problem

Large enterprise customers with portfolios of up to 1,000 sites saw slow file reads, and storage cost grew with assets that were rarely read.

What was built

• Latency work that cut 95th-percentile file reads by about 40% for large-portfolio enterprise customers
• Storage tiering and lifecycle handling for rarely read assets, cutting storage cost by about 30% on targeted workloads without slowing assets still in use
• Higher cache-hit ratios, so fewer requests reached origin storage

This was our founder's work as an employee of Pantheon. Pantheon is not a Destello client.