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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

#233
post #165

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.

Nilay from Backblaze here.

Yes - B2 is strongly consistent. When you upload an object using either the B2 Native or S3 API - the object is persisted to the final resting place before the upload completes. Therefore, you can list/download the file immediately after your upload completes.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#234

As a Synology user, please let this mean that Hyper Backup can work with B2 now (or at least soon).

Nilay from Backblaze here.

Synology Hyper Backup absolutely works. Details are here: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047171594

(If you saw my old answer, ignore it. I was misinformed.)

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#235
I remember when they had all their servers in one room and the redundancy boiled down to erasure encoding in single servers.

They've been doing incredible work in the open (storage server design, hardware reliability data, etc) and I'm really happy they've grown to where they are today.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#236
post #173

Used B2 heavily until recently as a origin server for a CDN. Few weeks ago we saw a spike in 502 / 504 responses. When I contacted their customer supported , I was pointed to the following URL where they explain in detail how they handle these errors https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-503-500-server-error/ Essentially they are not considered as errors and expect the client to retry loading the file. This approach won'…

You can definitely get read errors and your application should be aware of this and handle this use case. Amazon's own S3 is not immune to this and after years of running spark jobs which shard output across thousands of files on s3 (and load from the same) you'll see these underlying http errors on a daily scale even intra-region.

Even if you're doing multi region s3 replication you'll run into this for external clients semi-occasionally.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(backblaze ceo here) We also have a region in Europe: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/announcing-our-first-european...

Please consider an Asia/Pacific data center. I am from India and my company was not able to use B2 due to high response times even from European DC. Even a DC in Singapore will be helpful for us. - Thankful Personal Backup Customer

Bandwidth in asiapac is very expensive for non-incumbents and India is no exception.

I find it bizarre how in India you can get 100GB of LTE for a few dollars but cdn bandwidth can cost content providers more than that - which is absurd.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#238
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which means you can use it to .... or run your own backups You could, but if i read correctly (s3fs-fuse limitations): "random writes or appends to files require rewriting the entire file". So changing 1 bit of a 10GB file, means re-uploading 10GB. https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse#limitations

This changed in 1.86 and I updated the README as follows: > random writes or appends to files require rewriting the entire object, optimized with multi-part upload copy Now changing one bit means re-uploading 5 MB, the minimum S3 part size.

Only if the blackblaze implementation supports put byte range... Not supported by default.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > So how did they manage to get rid of those hidden costs? Or is the new S3 compatible API more expensive? The new S3 compatible APIs are the same cost as the original native B2 APIs. I'm the author of that original blog post, and we were able to get rid of SOME of the internal costs, but in the end we ate the cost of the load balancer. Internally I voted that we externalize that cost…

Are you guys apprehensive at all that supporting S3 might bring in more lower margin customers (ie higher transfer GB/store GB ratio)? In any case, thanks for B2 (happy customer) and good luck. Sounds like an exciting time.

(backblaze ceo here) We're happy to take customers regardless of which API they choose. Sure, we make a bit more on our B2 Native APIs, but ultimately I'd rather we make it easy for them to use us how they wish.

Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

#240
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

Wouldn't that require his wife to install and configure an SFTP client or something? B2 lets you use any browser.
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