Highly Available Block Storage • Hacker News Board

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#21

Post by boynamedsue » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 1:56 PM UTC

askmike wrote: post #16

crb wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

B2 is blob storage, like Google Cloud Storage or Amazon S3. What they have launched is SSD block storage, like Google persistent disks or Amazon EBS. (The TechCrunch article also got this confused.)

> Amazon EBS. Not more like amazon EFS?

No. EFS is NFS in the cloud which is NAS.

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#22

Post by happyslobro » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 1:56 PM UTC

I don't suppose DO or anyone else is already working on an Ansible addon for this?

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#23

Post by wiremine » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 1:58 PM UTC

Spun one up and ran some quick numbers on a 100GB volume:

root@ubuntu-1gb-nyc1-01:~# time dd if=/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_volume-nyc1-01 of=test.dat bs=1024 count=10000000 10000000+0 records in

10000000+0 records out

10240000000 bytes (10 GB) copied, 58.0655 s, 176 MB/s

real 0m58.248s

user 0m2.608s

sys 0m41.604s

Some quick observations:

* Easy to add one when creating a droplet; by default they let you create volumes with these sizes: 100GB, 250GB, 500GB, 1000GB, 1.95TB; it's also really easy to create your own size.

* You can resize in any increments; took about 4 seconds to go from 100GB to 110GB with no downtime; you obviously need to resize/manage the mounted volume yourself.

* [Edit 1] Deleting the droplet does NOT destroy the volume. Worth keeping in mind when you spin them up/down.

* [Edit 2] Remounting an existing volume to a new droplet was quick and painless.

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#24

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 1:59 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#25

Post by simos » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 2:01 PM UTC

Some early benchmarks about the new block storage, https://simos.info/blog/trying-out-lxd-containers-on-ubuntu-...

I did not get good speeds and I am wondering why that may be...

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#26

Post by marcstreeter » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 2:01 PM UTC

drtse4 wrote: post #17

A bit pricey for the long term but great if you just need to add some disk space to your vm and don't need the other improvements more expensive vms give you. I use DO mostly to compile stuff on Linux when i don't have access to a physical server, and storage size is always a problem.

The purpose of the block storage in this instance isn't about giving your vm/droplet more space. It's separation. That way any data that's on that device can be attached to another vm/droplet. It probably would be more cost effective just to upgrade the vm/droplet if space were a concern. It's at least how we've marketed the same feature for the past year or two via Codero's portal. Not to say I don't like how DO has entered the space: keeping it simple.

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#27

Post by mdasen » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 2:05 PM UTC

skrowl wrote: post #2

I like their straight forward pricing. $0.10 USD per GB per month. No IOPS limits. That said, how do you prevent a rogue droplet from going crazy and hogging up all of the SSD I/O?

Google doesn't charge for IOPS either, but they do explain how things are limited. For example, speed in MB/s is limited by the instance size so that you don't use the entire network link for your connection to the disk. IOPS are limited by the size of the disk. If you're sharing the disk with other people, you're going to be limited in your IOPS. For example, if you get 10GB of SSD storage, you'll get 300 random IOPS, but another user with 50GB of storage will get 1,500 IOPS because they're renting a larger portion of the disk.

If DigitalOcean isn't doing something limiting, they'll have to in order to prevent the situation that you're describing. You don't have to charge for it in order to prevent bad neighbors.

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/performance

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#28

Post by scurvy » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 2:07 PM UTC

What's the backend? Ceph?

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#29

Post by zbjornson » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 2:08 PM UTC

simos wrote: post #25

Some early benchmarks about the new block storage, https://simos.info/blog/trying-out-lxd-containers-on-ubuntu-... I did not get good speeds and I am wondering why that may be...

> The immediate benefits are that the latency is much lower with the new block storage

I think you might have misread the units: locally attached 50105 us (50 ms) vs block 546 ms.

The throughput numbers are on par with AWS and GCP block storage. This seems reasonable aside from the high latency.

Re: Highly Available Block Storage

#30

Post by marcstreeter » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 2:12 PM UTC

skrowl wrote: post #2

I like their straight forward pricing. $0.10 USD per GB per month. No IOPS limits. That said, how do you prevent a rogue droplet from going crazy and hogging up all of the SSD I/O?

There are limits - they are marketing their simplicity by avoiding complicated pricing schemes. This is typical DO, and I see that as a good thing especially if you're just dipping your feet into the concept. The past year or two that we've had block storage at Codero we've been marketing the ability to set your own IOPS with even our smallest blocks (1000/2000/3000 iops). That said I'd be interested to know exactly what performance they offer because they are definitely cheaper.