Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does "Charged for any portion of a GB." mean?
It means 1.01gb, 1.1gb, and 2.0gb are all charged the same
What about 0.1gb, 0.5gb? I guess that's my question. Is this a minimum charge per download?
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs
281–290 of 293 posts
Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> why wouldn't you just handle it on your end and provide the public with a single domain? That is what we did for the S3 protocol. It adds cost via a load balancer. The whole original storage design was based on the fact that in our original product line (Backblaze Personal Backup) we owned both ends of the protocol - our servers on the back end, and our client on the customer laptop. We were able to eliminate all l…
(I work at Google on Cloud Storage.)
Developers working with cloud storage APIs generally need to get used to the idea that not everything is going to work all of the time. Retries and proper status code/error handling are critical to making your application work properly in real-world conditions, and as "events" occur. Every major cloud storage provider has circumstances under which developers must retry to create reliable applications; Backblaze is no different. For GCS, we document truncated exponential backoff as the preferred strategy [1].
Google has its Global Service Load Balancer (GSLB) [2], which handles...let's just say an enormous amount of traffic. GSLB is just part of the ecosystem at Google.
It's hard to design a storage system that's "all things to all people"! There are a series of tradeoffs that need to be made. Backblaze optimizes for keeping storage costs as low as possible for large objects. There are other dimensions that customers are willing to pay for.
[1] https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/exponential-backoff [2] https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/production-...
Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Network neutrality is a difficult concept to apply because its core concept doesn't map well to reality. The core concept, in my mind, is that all packets should be treated equally, and should cost the customer the same amount per byte. The problem is that different packets take different network paths and have different costs to your provider. The bandwidth alliance partners are exchanging traffic via peering links,…
Is it really that difficult a concept? Comcast charging Netflix for access to Netflix's customers, when Netflix's customers are paying Comcast for Internet access, is bullshit. Reword it to be generic, and dress it up in more polite language, but that's what it is. Comcast, nor any other ISP, doesn't get to shake down Netflix or Google or Facebook nor any service providers, big or small, on the Internet. Sure, behind…
> Is it really that difficult a concept? Comcast charging Netflix for access to Netflix's customers, when Netflix's customers are paying Comcast for Internet access, is bullshit.
I agree, that it's bullshit, but please consider:
A telephone company charges me to have a phone line and per minute to place and receive calls, and charges whoemever I'm conversing with to have a phone line, and to call me.
If Comcast wasn't large enough for Netflix to want peering, Netflix would probably use paid transit to get there (they might even use paid transit that Comcast would also have to pay for).
So, the reason it's bullshit can't be because Netflix has to pay for a service that Comcast is providing; because paying for network services is the norm. The reason also can't be because Comcast is charging both ends of the connection for the service it is providing to both, namely connecting the two parties; because both sides paying for connectivity is the norm in telecommunications.
There's some other reason it's bullshit. A big factor, of course, is that internet video services compete with the ISPs video services, and there's some implicit unfairness there. I would say it's because the residential customer is stuck with a very limited set of choices, and can't pick an ISP that distinguishes itself with open peering. It might be because the norm for internet peering is if there is a significant imbalance in traffic, the party sending the most pays; so the residential ISPs should be paying their residential customers; this one doesn't quite work, because it's not actually a peering relationship, and the norm is transit customers pay the transit provider for traffic in either direction.
> Sure, behind the scenes there are backbone providers and peering arrangements and BGP, but those are technical details. Network neutrality means as a consumer I pay an ISP and get connected to the Internet.
The problem here is there is no "the Internet" to connect to. An ISP needs to connect to substantially all of the other networks; and while a small ISP may simply use a single upstream ISP, where it would be easy for the small ISP to be neutral (bits in = bits out), a larger ISP is going to have a diversity of connections, and that's going to lead to defacto non-neutrality as some connections are bigger than others, and some connections are longer than others, and some connections are more expensive than others.
I fully understand the desire to restrain residential ISPs (and mobile ISPs) from anti-competitive behavior; I guess network neutrality might work for that.
But, when you apply it to other networks, it doesn't seem to make sense. In this case, you have a group of networks that would like to lower costs, both for themselves, and their customers, and they've agreed to settlement free peering, and to also not charge customers for bandwidth on the settlement free links. Network neutrality doesn't really speak towards the interconnection, but says that customers should be charged the same rate for all bandwidth, even when the underlying costs are different. I don't understand why that's a good thing in this case?
Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Network neutrality is a difficult concept to apply because its core concept doesn't map well to reality. The core concept, in my mind, is that all packets should be treated equally, and should cost the customer the same amount per byte. The problem is that different packets take different network paths and have different costs to your provider. The bandwidth alliance partners are exchanging traffic via peering links,…
Mandatory line sharing is an interesting idea. We've tried it before, back in the DSL era (2000s). Not saying we shouldn't try it again, but it only sorta worked. Whether instructions came down from ATT corporate offices or were malice, or incompetence, on the part of locally contracted installing technicians; the shared boxes were the worst of the commons. If a neighbor got from a rival DSL provider, your Internet w…
I'm pretty aware of the issues with past implementations of line sharing; a competent regulator would be required to iron out these issues. Of course, network neutrality requires a competent regulator as well.
Pricing was a big issue in the past --- where the 'wholesale' per-line tariff charged to the competitive carrier was more than the retail price charged to incumbent customers.
I think, in most cases, new install breaks other user types of issues are related to poor records of which line is used by which customer; that happens within the incumbent as well though (when I got ADSL2 installed, one of my neighbor's connections went out, and pretty soon there were three AT&T trucks on the street to work everything out). That particular issue could probably be solved by allowing the incumbent to manage all the installs and monitoring for install-time customer steering.
The federal mandate no longer covers line sharing, it only covers line leasing for copper telephone service; wherever your premises is directly connected to, if there's space for competitive equipment, the incumbent must make it available. Of course, most telephone companies have moved customers to remote terminals for better speeds, and there's no room for competitive equipment in the remote terminals; and a lot of telephone companies are replacing copper networks with optical networks, and those aren't covered either. The whole concept got submarined by the insistence that it apply to telephone networks and not cable or other "new technology" networks, and then deciding not to apply it anywhere in light of court cases that applying to one and not the other was unfair.
Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs
#285Earlier 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…
(I work at Google on Cloud Storage).
"Developers are supposed to" is a scary way to start a sentence. ;)
Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's what gp meant. Why not use a standard protcol like SFTP?
I don't see how you could cram all of S3's functionality into sftp? How would you configure a lifecycle policy for a file for example? Or generate a signed URL? It seems to me you would only get a very narrow subset of the functionality.
I see, I suppose there wasn't a free standard before and S3's API just inofficially became one.
Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs
#287Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would S3cmd cli work as well?
I tried s3cmd according to their blog post without success. Just kept complaining that the access key was invalid. Which is a shame because `s3cmd` is much easier to use than `b2`.
Yev here -> make sure you ping our b2feedback@backblaze.com address and let us know about that experience, we're writing it all down and keeping tabs on what's not working as intended.
Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
It means 1.01gb, 1.1gb, and 2.0gb are all charged the same
What about 0.1gb, 0.5gb? I guess that's my question. Is this a minimum charge per download?
Yev here -> No there's no minimum charges for downloads, it's just $0.01/GB down and $0.005/GB/Mo for storage, but everything is calculated on a byte hour level :)
Re: Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs
#290Ooo, even more reason to set-up a NextCloud instance now! Previously, it wasn't really practical to set-up B2 as external storage because you'd need to also set up a compat layer.
I set this up yesterday, and it was a breeze.
Just had to be sure to omit the B2 external storage folder from the backups on my Nextcloud server.
Now only if Virtualmin (YC ‘08) supported virtual server backups to S3-compatible B2 cloud storage… There’s an open ticket for this at https://www.virtualmin.com/node/65024