Abstract: An apparatus in one embodiment comprises a multi-tier storage system having at least a front-end storage tier and a back-end storage tier. The multi-tier storage system is implemented at least in part utilizing a plurality of virtual machines of cloud infrastructure. The front-end storage tier comprises a plurality of storage nodes of a cluster file system, with the storage nodes being implemented on respective ones of the virtual machines. The front-end storage tier further comprises a software-defined storage pool accessible to the storage nodes and implemented utilizing local disk resources of respective ones of the virtual machines. The back-end storage tier of the multi-tier storage system comprises at least one object store. At least a subset of the virtual machines may further comprise respective compute nodes configured to access the multi-tier storage system. Other illustrative embodiments include systems, methods and processor-readable storage media.