DevConf.US 2026

EZIO: Predictable, Fast, Scalable BitTorrent-Based Bare Metal Provisioning
2026-09-25 , 101 (Capacity 48)

Deploying OS images to bare metal clusters is painful. Unicast scales linearly with node count. Multicast stalls if one node is slow. Past BitTorrent approaches either transfer entire raw partitions (wasting bandwidth) or require RAM buffering for image conversion (size limited).

EZIO's provisioning time depends on image size and bandwidth, not node count. It transfers only used filesystem blocks and writes directly to raw disk by calculating offsets on the fly. No RAM buffering, no image conversion, no size limit. Each node works independently. Broken nodes can rejoin after recovery. This enables deploying large HPC environments with pre-installed software and data. Clonezilla has integrated EZIO for production use.

Benchmarks: On HDD (50GB, 32 nodes), 11x faster than unicast, 50% faster than multicast. In the cluster with NVMe SSD and 10G network at Taiwan's National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC), 500 MB/s across 32 nodes. Lab tests reach 700 MB/s.


What level of experience should the audience have to best understand your session?: Intermediate - attendees should be familiar with the subject

Date Huang is a Solution Architect with 5 years of experience in cloud and datacenter networking. He is the creator of STUNMESH-go and maintainer of EZIO Project. His expertise includes AWS/Azure/GCP networking, OpenStack, Kubernetes, SD-WAN, and open-source development.