Architecting Enclave Storage at Marlin
Designed a tiered storage layer for microservices running inside AWS Nitro Enclaves.
- Distributed Systems
- AWS Nitro Enclaves
- Storage Architecture
- Rust
Nitin Goel
Senior Software Engineer at Atlassian
From their time as
Founding Member
Marlin • 2020 - 2024
Overview
Nitin designed a persistent storage layer for microservices running in AWS Nitro Enclaves, where native disk storage was unavailable. The tiered design met differing latency requirements and cut operational storage cost by 60%.
The Story
Nitin worked on secure distributed processing at Marlin using AWS Nitro Enclaves. The environment provided isolated, memory-only execution, so microservices could not rely on native persistent disks.
He owned the architecture from scratch. The design needed to support different throughput and latency requirements across load balancers, workers, and gateway proxies while remaining cost-conscious.
Nitin created a unified storage interface over a tiered design. Hot data stayed in memory and Redis for sub-millisecond retrieval, while persistent state was backed asynchronously to IPFS through outbound HTTP calls.
The system met heterogeneous latency needs across the microservices and reduced storage operational cost by 60%.
Ownership Snapshot
Broad role
Founding engineer for secure distributed processing.
Goal
Provide persistent storage across varied service latency needs.
Direct ownership
Architected and implemented the storage layer from scratch.
Team execution
Delivered the system independently within the Marlin engineering team.