41–50 of 129 posts
Hats off to whoever convinced management that selling Colossus via cloud was Artificial Intelligence. Bravo.
Everything is AI these days. Does it still need convincing?
You can bring data in and out of the GPU quickly and improve utilization.
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 r…
Everyone needs to learn to use a single, unique, unambiguous URL for new product announcements like this. Google aren't the only company that consistently mess this up, but given how they built a 1.95 trillion company on top of crawling URLs on the web they really should have an internal culture that values giving things unique URLs! [I had to learn this lesson myself: I used to blog "weeknotes" every week or two whe…
Google's not really at fault here: the OP submitted a link to an article called "Introducing Ironwood TPUs and new innovations in AI Hypercomputer" that happens to mention Rapid Storage way down the page. In case marketing seems to move faster than documentation though, since I can't find any mention of this in the main GCS docs. https://cloud.google.com/search?hl=en&q=rapid%20storage
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is S3 Express One Zone performance greatly improved to standard S3 like GCP rapid storage? My understanding is S3 Express One Zone is just more cost effective. > 20x faster random-read data loading than a Cloud Storage regional bucket.
Update: Just read this article[1] which clarifies S3 Express One Zone. Yes, performance is greatly improved, but actually storage costs are 8x more than a standard S3 bucket. The naming S3 Express One Zone is terrible and a bit misleading on pricing changes. [1] https://www.warpstream.com/blog/s3-express-is-all-you-need
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…
They charge $20/TB/month for basic cloud storage. You can build storage servers for $20/TB flat. If you add 10% for local parity, 15% free space, 5% in spare drives, and $2000/rack/month overhead, then triple everything for redundancy purposes, then over a 3 year period the price of using your own hard drives is $115/TB and google's price is $720. Over 5 years it's $145 versus $1200. And that's before they charge you massive bandwidth fees.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Delivering "HDD prices" is a bold claim there. They charge $20/TB/month for basic cloud storage. You can build storage servers for $20/TB flat. If you add 10% for local parity, 15% free space, 5% in spare drives, and $2000/rack/month overhead, then triple everything for redundancy purposes, then over a 3 year period the price of using your own hard drives is $115/TB and google's price is $720. Over 5 years it's $145…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Delivering "HDD prices" is a bold claim there. They charge $20/TB/month for basic cloud storage. You can build storage servers for $20/TB flat. If you add 10% for local parity, 15% free space, 5% in spare drives, and $2000/rack/month overhead, then triple everything for redundancy purposes, then over a 3 year period the price of using your own hard drives is $115/TB and google's price is $720. Over 5 years it's $145…
You forgot paying yourself to set that up.