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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

#161

Post by fabiandesimone »

GeneticGenesis wrote: post #146
budmang wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(backblaze ceo here) B2 is a great origin store for your video files. If you're streaming to lots of viewers, using a CDN with Backblaze B2 is optimal. We partnered with Cloudflare as a founding member of the Bandwidth Alliance so you can store your videos with B2 and transit them for free to Cloudflare, which can serve to your viewers.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding was that Cloudflare should not be used to deliver video files unless using Cloudflare's "stream" product, IE specifically this [1]. [1]: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/cloudflare-how-not-to-vio...

Would love to confirm this.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#162

Post by shliachtx »

atYevP wrote: post #29
waffle_ss wrote: post #21

Just a year ago B2 couldn't do server-side file copying.[1] If you wanted to rename or move a file you had to re-upload the whole thing (not great for large multi-gigabyte files)! That ruled them out of consideration for storing my personal backups. Glad to see they've since fixed that, and with this update are clearly continuing to improve ergonomics. I'll have to give B2 a fresh look. [1]: https://github.com/Backbl…

Yev here -> thanks! We're constantly working on making the platform better, and copy-file was definitely a widely requested feature! That plus S3 Compatibility, for folks who wanted to integrated with B2 Cloud Storage but didn't have the resources to write code to our B2 Native API.

I just finished writing a new feature for internal use using S3. I hadn't even considered Backblaze at the time, but now that I am seeing this news we may end up using it, considering there is virtually no cost (to switch) and we haven't deployed yet.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#163

Post by anotheracct_ »

atYevP wrote: post #58
ksec wrote: post #38

Backblaze is also the founding member of Bandwidth Alliance, meaning getting those B2 via Cloudflare is essentially free. So you are only paying for Storage. ( Correct me if I am on this one ) I wonder why doesn't ALL non HyperScale Cloud Vendors, like Linode and DO provide one click third party backup to B2. You should always store offsite backup somewhere. And B2 is perfect.

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 ;-)

Isn't this incompatible with Net Neutrality?

I think Cloudflare already was against net neutrality, but people who believe in that principle might need to avoid Backblaze as well if that is the case.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#164

Post by rsync »

waffle_ss wrote: post #43
nicolaslem wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For backups, mapping one file to one object rarely works well. Tools that use this strategy come with a long list of scenarios requiring expensive operations. For instance renaming a directory or changing a few bytes in a large file. On the other hand tools that don't view the object storage as a file system have way less gotchas. In my experience B2 + restic works really well.

That's a fair point but this is for my family photos and videos; in the event I die I'd rather the S3 bucket I hand over to my wife/kids in my last wishes look like a real filesystem rather than a bazillion blobs that require a special tool with a programmer's expertise to reassemble

" ... in the event I die I'd rather the S3 bucket I hand over to my wife/kids in my last wishes look like a real filesystem rather than a bazillion blobs that require a special tool ..."

You'd need a cloud storage provider that just gave you a plain old UNIX filesystem to do whatever you want with.

It's too bad nobody does that ...

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#165

Post by rkrzr »

Does Backblaze offer strong consistency for files?

The killer feature of Google Cloud Storage in my eyes is its ability to be strongly consistent, if you set the right HTTP headers. This is not possible for Amazon S3, which is always eventually consistent and makes it unusable for many use cases where you need to be able to guarantee that customers will always see the newest version of a file.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#166

Post by microcolonel »

budmang wrote: post #100
rochester46 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does AWS (and GCP and Azure) not do the exact same thing when transferring data out via Cloudfront (or their respective CDN)? Is Backblaze really special in that regard?

(backblaze ceo here) AWS is free to Cloudfront because that's an AWS service. AWS/GCP/Azure are not free (and quite expensive) to Cloudflare. Backblaze is free to Cloudflare.

And Cloudflare is also the winning reverse proxy caching provider, the one that people tend to use even despite transit charges to AWS/GCP/Azure.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#167

Post by aftbit »

brianwski wrote: post #141
guenthert wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DNS resolver library of your client is allowed to cache the IP address for a given hostname for up to TTL. If it does so, the cost should be negligible.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > The DNS resolver library of your client is allowed to cache the IP address for a given hostname for up to TTL Not only that, but one mistake a lot of developers made early on was asking for a location to upload for every upload. That was NEVER the intention. In fact that annoys our servers also. Developers are supposed to request a location to upload ONCE, and then upload to that lo…

Although that implies that you need to cache that location to upload somewhere and request it from your own cache. Also, you need to write error-handling code (which will only fire rarely, so is hard to test) to deal with redirects or fall back to re-fetching the location if it changes.

These things are not particularly difficult, but they require additional mind-space to accommodate. Most developers will just do the simplest thing that works, performance be damned. If the simplest path is slow, they'll just remember "B2 is slow", no matter how unfair that is.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#168

Post by whalesalad »

brianwski wrote: post #141
guenthert wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DNS resolver library of your client is allowed to cache the IP address for a given hostname for up to TTL. If it does so, the cost should be negligible.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > The DNS resolver library of your client is allowed to cache the IP address for a given hostname for up to TTL Not only that, but one mistake a lot of developers made early on was asking for a location to upload for every upload. That was NEVER the intention. In fact that annoys our servers also. Developers are supposed to request a location to upload ONCE, and then upload to that lo…

If you can use one of these arbitrary domain names for hours or days ... why wouldn't you just handle it on your end and provide the public with a single domain?

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#169

Post by toohotatopic »

ksec wrote: post #160
hangonhn wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so mind-blowing-ly crazy and awesome. I've always loved the idea of Backblaze but never tried it. But this combination is so insanely good and valuable. When an efficient market/economy works correctly, the results are just amazing: Cloudflare and Backblaze essentially got their unit costs for their respective products so low that for just a small money fee, I can do something that would have been prohibitive…

On the note of unit cost I doubt it will be much lower in the near future. Cost / GB isn't falling much if at all, and their Load balancer are already eating into their margin which means any further reduction in unit cost are only gaining back what they took in with the S3 API. Hopefully the new S3 compatible API means they could make all that back with volume. But this is also a sad realisation that storage tech ar…

Wasn't there a startup on hn some weeks ago that used a crypto mining approach to server management that was much cheaper?

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#170

Post by manigandham »

anotheracct_ wrote: post #163
atYevP wrote: 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 ;-)

Isn't this incompatible with Net Neutrality? I think Cloudflare already was against net neutrality, but people who believe in that principle might need to avoid Backblaze as well if that is the case.

No, this has nothing to do with net neutrality. Your ISP isn't discriminating what data you consume, whether it's from cloudflare or another CDN.

This is about the fact that bandwidth is usually bought by capacity between networks rather than usage and they're passing those savings on to you instead of charging expensive per-GB costs like the major clouds.

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