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Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

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Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#111
That's awesome, but I really want to see lightning fast response times and TTFB... Second pain point is the number of retries needed for uploading a large batch of small files. Those are the main reasons I'm still considering migrating away. I really wish I shouldn't as otherwise I love the pricing and the philosophy.

Edit: also think DigitalOcean Spaces and B2 might be better off merging together, or Spaces being a whitelabel B2 in disguise (both are part of BWA).

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#112
post #92
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yev from Backblaze here -> That's correct. We're a founding member of the Bandwidth Alliance and you can find more info about that on our Blog ( https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-and-cloudflare-part... ) or FAQ ( https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666928-Using... ). May the 4th be with you ;-)

Hey I've been wondering this but are the transaction costs also waived or is it just the bandwidth fees? I feel like if both are gone it'd be hard to make a profit...

[deleted]

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#113

I'm curious what their load balancing layer looks like. There's alot of interesting options. (Disclaimer: I've worked in the CDN and the storage space in the past) If their load balancer is smart enough it can call the dispatcher, and make use of something like https://zaiste.net/nginx_x_accel_header/ to figure out where to forward the request. Unfortunately this still requires uploads be proxied through the dispatch…

Hi! Backblaze employee who did some of the LB stuff here. It's relatively standard/straightforward. There's a L4 load balancing layer using IPVS and ECMP-via-BGP, then a custom application that does the actual proxying/forwarding to the appropriate vault.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#114
post #54

As a developer that supports B2 (I write ExpanDrive) I think it’s great that they are moving on from an API that doesn’t expose any extra value. That being said, I wish B2 performance was better. Throughput is dramatically slower than S3.

What region are you moving from/to? Last I checked, b2 only exists in datacenters on the US west coast.

They have an Amsterdam Datacenter https://www.backblaze.com/blog/announcing-our-first-european...

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#115
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Cloudflare ToS explicitly exclude that use-case. 2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content The Service is offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as a part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Service solely for the purpose of serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other functionally equivalent applications and render…

In a previous HN post [1] where someone wrote up how to use B2 as an image host, the Cloudflare CEO chimed in and addressed rule 2.8 specifically, saying if Cloudflare workers are used for URL prettifying and redirecting, a different ToS is applied and that use-case would be fine. Does that mean your video use-case would also be fine? I have no idea. An HN comment from the CEO doesn't seem like it would hold up if Cl…

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so I'm biased. :-)

> B2, as a storage service, is not really intended for "serving web pages and websites" — it's for larger files, binaries, etc

It might be missing a couple features (which is a pet peeve of mine) but we SURELY intend for it to be used for serving web pages. That's one of the largest differences between "Backblaze Personal Backup" (our original product line) and Backblaze B2. The largest parts of the redesign/refit when we originally did B2 was around the concept of what we call "Friendly URLs" (web page names, folder names) instead of just ugly 82 character hexadecimal file names like Backblaze Personal Backup stores all your files in.

For full disclosure, Backblaze B2 isn't a great "hosting" solution for something like WordPress because we lack two or three things, one of which is comically easy to fix and I keep trying to convince everyone to do it. The issue is URLs that end in a "/" (trailing slash) basically need to "guess" that after that is an ".html" or ".php" or whatever. So the URL: https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/ski-epic-c/full/2015_scotl... does not work, but the URL: https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/ski-epic-c/full/2015_scotl... does work. All modern web servers do this automatically filling in of the "index.html", but it is missing from Backblaze B2 currently. And it would take just a day or two for one of our developers to fix it. And dang it, I'm going to get it done one of these days.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#116
post #61

Now that we're talking about B2, has or is anyone using them for latency-sensitive small-file object storage? I'm about to take the plunge and set up benchmarks, my use-case is that I want to store and serve ~ 500k small files (30b-1MB) per day to website visitors. So far B2 support has told me that it shouldn't be a problem, and early benchmarking indicates the same, just curious if anyone had stories from the trenc…

I'm seeing horrible TTFB from Europe. Most files are fast but sometimes a request is stuck for 10s or more...

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#117
post #103
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey I've been wondering this but are the transaction costs also waived or is it just the bandwidth fees? I feel like if both are gone it'd be hard to make a profit...

For that integration it's just the download fees. The transactions do still get billed, but many people can stay within the free daily allotment.

Where can I find the pricing info for this allotment?

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#119
This is huge because it means you can use things like S3 Fuse to mount your storage. Which means you can use it to extend your local disk, or run your own backups, or whatever.

Amusingly the price to store 1.2TB of data is the same as the cost of their backup plan, so if your disk is smaller than that, you could save a few bucks running your own backups. Until you have to restore (from what I can tell restores are free on their backup plans but would cost money on the S3 plan).

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