181–190 of 374 posts
I am not from Oracle and I am also running startup with growing pains. Oracle is a bit late to the Cloud game so they are loading up customer's base now and squeezing ears will come in 3-5 years down the road. Maybe you can take advantage of this.
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Does Snowball let you exfiltrate data from AWS? I was under the impression it was only for bulk ingestion.
First sentence on the linked page: "With AWS Snowball, you pay only for your use of the device and for data transfer out of AWS. "
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Depends what you’re doing I suppose. I think the three companies I mentioned (CloudFlare, Zoom and WhatsApp) are good examples of infrastructure investment as a competitive advantage.
None of those are start-ups , though. They've either IPOed (CloudFlare, Zoom) or been acquired by publicly-traded companies (WhatsApp). A startup is a company that might still need to pivot to find its final business model, potentially shedding its entire existing infrastructure base in the process. Start-ups are why IaaS providers don't default to instance reservations — because, as a startup, you might suddenly rea…
That was before the cloud existed. They had to poach experts from hosting companies to build and maintain their gear. They built a 24/7 NOC, did server repair, became network experts, storage experts, database experts. Besides being incredibly complex and burdensome, it was financially risky. If they missed their projections they could over-invest by 1-2 million bucks, or even worse, not have the capacity needed to meet demand.
If somebody told us back then that we could pay a premium to be able to scale at any time as much as we needed, when we needed it? We would have flipped out. We had heard about Amazon building some kind of "grid computing" thing, but it seemed like a pipe dream for universities, like parallel computing. Turns out it was a different kind of grid.
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Roughly a decade ago S3 storage pricing had a ~10x premium over self-hosted. The convenience of not having to touch any hardware is expensive.
Its also important to consider how often disks will fail when you are operating hundreds of them - its probably more often than you'd think, and if you don't have someone on staff and nearby to your colo provider you're going to pay a lot in remote hands fees. Your colo facility will almost certainly have 24/7 staff on hand who can help you with tasks like swapping disks from a pile of spares, but expect to pay $300+…
As others have said, it’s a complicated question, but if you have the resources/wherewithal to run Ceph but don’t want to deal with co-location, you can get a bunch of storage servers from Hetzner and get a much better grasp on cost over S3. For example, at 10PB with every object duplicated twice (so 20 PB raw storage), you’d need ~90 of their SX293[1] boxes, coming out to around €30k/mo. This doesn’t include time to…
Buying just one of these looks pretty challenging, let alone ~90. :(
Meta-question: shouldn't there be a website dedicated specifically to reliable, crowd-sourced answers to questions like these? Does it really not exist? I'm thinking like StackShare, but you start from "What's the problem I'm trying to solve?", not "What products are big companies using?".
What if you want to move off S3? Let's do the math. * To store 10+ PB of data. * You need 15 PB of storage (running at 66% capacity) * You need 30 PB of raw disks (twice for redundancy). You're looking at buying thousands of large disks, in the order of a million dollar upfront. Do you have that sort of money available right now? Maybe you do. Then, are you ready to receive and handle entire pallets of hardware? That…
Not that this fundamentally changes your analysis and other totally valid points, but the 2x bit can probably be reduced a lot.
[1] https://engineering.fb.com/2015/05/04/core-data/under-the-ho...
Perhaps it’s a mix of some app pattern changes and leveraging the storage tier options in AWS to reduce your cost.
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> Since you only have one, they are gonna be on call 24/7, so assume you’ll burn them out after a year and a half and need to hire a new one.... This person's entire job is managing a few racks of hard drives? How often do you think they're actually going to get called in? > Since redundancy is a thing, double that $350k. True, but you can do redundancy for cheaper with parity or tape. > And 10pb is what they have no…
>>> This person's entire job is managing a few racks of hard drives? How often do you think they're actually going to get called in? How about every day? Quick guess how often disks need to be replaced when there are thousands of them. ;)
Also for one or two thousand disks I would expect less than one failure per week.
If you have good sysadmin/devops types, this is a few racks of storage in a datacenter. Ceph is pretty good at managing something this size, and offers an S3 interface to the data (with a few quirks). We were mostly storing massive keys that were many gigabytes, so if you have smaller keys, so I'm not sure about performance/scalding limits with smaller keys and 10PB. I'd be sure to give your team a few months to buil…
The is amazing. Thank you. I’ve been looking at Backblaze storage pods that seem to be designed for that use case. Never rented rack space. Do you remember somehow the math on how much cheaper it was or how you thought about upfront cost vs ongoing. Just order of magnitude would be great.