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Colossus for Rapid Storage

cloud.google.com

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Re: Colossus for Rapid Storage

#11

Post by re-thc »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #8
alobrah wrote: post #4

FYI this was unveiled at the 2025 Google Next conference, and they're apparently unveiling a gRPC client for Rapid Storage, which appears to be a very thin wrapper over Colossus itself, as this is just zonal storage.

Struggling to find a definition, but seemingly zonal just means there's a massive instance per cluster. Did find some interesting recent (March 28th, 2025) reads though! Colossus under the hood: How we deliver SSD performance at HDD prices https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer... I kind of thought you meant ZNS / https://zonedstorage.io/ at first, or it's more recent better awesomer counterpart…

> Struggling to find a definition, but seemingly zonal just means there's a massive instance per cluster.

There are a number of zones in a region. Region usually means city. Zone can mean data center. Rarely just means some sort of isolation (separate power / network).

Re: Colossus for Rapid Storage

#12

Post by eitally »

hiddencost wrote: post #7

Hats off to whoever convinced management that selling Colossus via cloud was Artificial Intelligence. Bravo.

I don't fault them for this at all. AI isn't possible without the full infra stack, which clearly includes storage (and compute, and networking, and data pipelining, and and and...). There's an entire ecosystem of ISVs that only do one of these things, very well (Pure Storage, for example, or Lamba or Coreweave, or Confluent (Kafka + Flink with LLM integration). While it might be more precisely accurate to state "AI enabling" tech, I'll give them a pass.

Re: Colossus for Rapid Storage

#13

Post by klabb3 »

hiddencost wrote: post #7

Hats off to whoever convinced management that selling Colossus via cloud was Artificial Intelligence. Bravo.

That’s an actually impressive level of spin. Flashback to when shipping companies were slapping blockchain on international container shipments.

Re: Colossus for Rapid Storage

#14

Post by bushbaba »

Glad to see the zonal object store take off. Such massive bandwidth speed will re define data analytics where 99% of all queries able to run on a single node faster than what distributed compute can offer.

Re: Colossus for Rapid Storage

#15

Post by bushbaba »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #8
alobrah wrote: post #4

FYI this was unveiled at the 2025 Google Next conference, and they're apparently unveiling a gRPC client for Rapid Storage, which appears to be a very thin wrapper over Colossus itself, as this is just zonal storage.

Struggling to find a definition, but seemingly zonal just means there's a massive instance per cluster. Did find some interesting recent (March 28th, 2025) reads though! Colossus under the hood: How we deliver SSD performance at HDD prices https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer... I kind of thought you meant ZNS / https://zonedstorage.io/ at first, or it's more recent better awesomer counterpart…

It’s GCP’s answer to AWS S3 express zone https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/express-one-zone/

Re: Colossus for Rapid Storage

#16

Post by bushbaba »

hiddencost wrote: post #7

Hats off to whoever convinced management that selling Colossus via cloud was Artificial Intelligence. Bravo.

You gotta feed the GPUs & TPUs with enough data to avoid them sitting idle. Which starts to become incredibly challenging with latest gen GPU/TPU chips

Re: Colossus for Rapid Storage

#17

Post by pj_mukh »

Super interesting! Rapid Storage especially, very useful, but that first line:

"Today's innovation isn't born in a lab or at a drafting board; it's built on the bedrock of AI infrastructure. "

Uhh..No. Even as an AI developer I can tell that is some AI Comms person tripping over.

Re: Colossus for Rapid Storage

#19

Post by dang »

alobrah wrote: post #3

For some reason, text highlight didn't work, so here's the text-highlighted link: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/whats-new-wit...

That link doesn't work for me, so here's the relevant bit:

Rapid Storage: A new Cloud Storage zonal bucket that enables you to colocate your primary storage with your TPUs or GPUs for optimal utilization. It provides up to 20x faster random-read data loading than a Cloud Storage regional bucket.

(Normally we wouldn't allow a post like this which cherry-picks one bit of a larger article, but judging by the community response it's clear that you've put your finger on something important, so thanks! We're always game to suspend the rules when doing so is interesting.)

Re: Colossus for Rapid Storage

#20

Post by dang »

xk3 wrote: post #6
alobrah wrote: post #3

For some reason, text highlight didn't work, so here's the text-highlighted link: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/whats-new-wit...

The gods strip off interesting bits of URLs when you submit it

if you saw that code you wouldn't deify it
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