NVIDIA/aistore v1.4.3

4.3

Repository: NVIDIA/aistore

Tag: v1.4.3

Published: 2026-03-25T22:39:15Z

Prerelease: no

Release notes: AIStore 4.3 introduces native bucket inventory (NBI) for remote buckets, backed by a new system-bucket namespace. Buckets with millions or tens of millions of objects can now be listed from AIS-managed inventory snapshots instead of traversing the backend on every call.

This release also adds full IPv6 networking support across all three logical networks and the transport streaming layer, with cluster-wide address-family configuration and automatic IPv4 fallback.

4.3 expands authentication and key-management capabilities with JWKS persistence, manual key rotation, standard JWT claims, and a new key-provider abstraction. Client-side multipart download is significantly improved across the Python SDK, Go APIs, and aisloader, with a new multiprocessing-based parallel downloader backed by a shared-memory ring buffer. The Python SDK and ETL toolchain add streaming transform support across multiple server styles and improve retry handling.

Improvements include media-aware worker parallelism, global rebalance hardening, per-bucket GCP credentials, remote-bucket support for rechunk, multipart whole-object checksum, and various backend and reliability fixes.

Object HEAD v2, introduced as experimental in 4.2, is now stable.

This release includes over 300 commits since 4.2 and is fully backward compatible.

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Table of Contents

1. [Native Bucket Inventory (NBI)](#native-bucket-inventory-nbi) 2. [System Buckets](#system-buckets) 3. [IPv6 Networking](#ipv6-networking) 4. [Multi-Part Download (MPD)](#multi-part-download) 5. [Multi-Part Upload: Whole-Object Checksum](#multi-part-upload-whole-object-checksum) 6. [Global Rebalance](#global-rebalance) 7. [Multi-Credential GCP Backend](#multi-credential-gcp-backend) 8. [Authentication and Key Management](#authentication-and-key-management) 9. [Media-Aware Worker Parallelism](#media-aware-worker-parallelism) 10. [Object HEAD v2](#object-head-v2) 11. [ETL](#etl) 12. [Rechunk: Remote Bucket Support and --sync-remote](#rechunk-remote-bucket-sync) 13. [Python SDK](#python-sdk) 14. [CLI](#cli) 15. [Runtime, Backend, and Reliability Fixes](#runtime-backend-and-reliability-fixes) 16. [Documentation](#documentation) 17. [Build, CI, and Tools](#build-ci-and-tools) 18. [Upgrade Notes](#upgrade-notes)

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Native Bucket Inventory (NBI)

Native bucket inventory is experimental in 4.3. It gives AIS a built-in way to create and reuse inventory snapshots of remote buckets.

NBI currently applies to remote buckets only: cloud buckets (including S3, GCS, Azure, and OCI) and remote AIS buckets.

The goal is straightforward: make listing large remote buckets - those with millions or tens of millions of objects - substantially faster to list. Direct backend listings at that scale can take minutes or longer and repeat the same remote roundtrips on every next-page call. With NBI, AIS builds a cluster-managed inventory snapshot once, then serves subsequent listings from local storage, supporting pagination and prefix filtering without touching the backend.

The implementation includes:

• new CLI commands to create, inspect, and remove inventories
• inventory-backed list-objects via the same distributed flow used for in-cluster ais:// buckets
• paginated reads and continuation tokens
• prefix filtering over inventory snapshots
• inventory metadata including object count, chunk count, participating targets, and cluster-map version
• support for empty inventory names (lookup by bucket name)
• handling of small buckets where some targets may have nothing to list
• improved cache behavior and page-size handling during listing
• deprecation of the older S3-specific inventory path in favor of a native AIS implementation (see [Upgrade Notes](#upgrade-notes))

> NBI is primarily a latency-reduction tool. Since ais:// data and metadata are already in the cluster, there is no latency tax to justify a separate inventory layer. > Still, it remains a valid option for point-in-time consistency (snapshotting) - to be possibly considered in the future.

Commits

• c4ee603ed: Initial NBI support; create ais://.sys-inventory on first use
• 8daff7a67: Create-inventory 2PC; target validation and execution
• 416fc041b: Add top-level ais nbi {create|rm|show}
• 4be7dcd90: Initial list-objects integration for NBI
• f3472105d: Switch NBI listing from R-flow to A-flow
• ffefd96db: Replace page-based knobs with NamesPerChunk
• ee7514cde: Best-effort page sizing for distributed NBI listing
• 846ee81af: Add chunk cache; cover tiny-page and empty-name cases
• 51a1b3889: Extend metadata; improve default and verbose show nbi
• 364e67361: Handle small buckets and empty inventories

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System Buckets

System buckets establish a reserved namespace for AIS-managed internal data.

The first system bucket is:

• ais://.sys-inventory - stores native bucket inventory snapshots as AIS-managed internal objects

System buckets are created on demand and can be listed and inspected with regular CLI commands. At the same time, they are infrastructure: users are not expected to write into them directly or depend on their internal object layout.

This namespace lays the groundwork for more AIS-managed content in future releases.

Commits

• 347e27e12: Introduce system buckets; reserve leading-dot names
• c4ee603ed: First system bucket: ais://.sys-inventory
• 2813f2f1d: Add system-bucket docs; clarify NBI and bucket naming

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IPv6 Networking

IPv6 support is now available across all three logical HTTP networks and the transport streaming…