71–80 of 129 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it inapt? If all you care about is an 8-bit AI workload (there's definitely a market for that), it's nice to have 24x the speed.
It's an apples to oranges comparison.
AFAIK, there wasn't a faster 8-bit super computer to compare to - which is why they made the comparison.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like your comparison with self-built storage, but comparing $20/TB/month with other CLOUD offerings, we see: * hetzner storage box starts from $4/month for 1TB, and then goes down to $2.4/TB/month if you rent a 10TB box. * mega starts from €10/month for 2TB, and goes down to €2/TB/month if you get a 16TB plan * backblaze costs (starts from?) $6/TB/month I was looking for a cheap cloud storage recently, so have a a…
I get the impression that business has always been about being the best schmoozer more than about having the best product. BTW at Hetzner you can rent servers with very large (hundred of TB) non-redundant storage for an effective price of about $1.50/TB/month. If you want to build a cloud storage product, that seems like a good starting point - of course, once you take into account redundancy, spare capacity, and pay…
and thus, market efficiency feels like a myth. This feels most true when it comes to cloud services. They're way overpriced in multiple different common cases at the big providers
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would pay serious money if they sold CFS as a service but on AWS.
Hi, I'm looking for a job. Are you willing to pay me serious money to set up CFS as a service on your AWS?
What jeffbee is talking about is Google's proprietary Colossus File System, and all its transitive dependencies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I understand your belief that One Zone implies less expensive, but I’m staunchly in favor of them having it in the name so people know that their data is in a single AZ. The storage class succinctly summarizes faster with lower availability.
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…
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think the joke here is that somehow management refused to sell Colossus (which is such an obvious nice product just like BigQuery) before and it takes "AI" to convince them.
I always assumed (from outside Google) that the problem was that Colossus had to make a "no malicious actors" assumption in its design in order to make the performance/scaling guarantees it does; and that therefore just exposing it directly to the public would make it possible for someone to DoS-attack the Colossus cluster.
My logic was that there's actually nothing forcing [the public GCP service of] BigTable to require that a full copy of the dataset be kept hot across the nodes, with pre-reserved storage space — rather than mostly decoupling origin storage from compute† — unless it was to prevent some DoS vector.
As for exactly what that DoS vector is... maybe GC/compaction policy-engine logic? (AFAICT, Colossus has pluggable "send compute to data" GC, which internal-BigTable and GCS both use. But external-BigTable forces the GC to be offloaded to the client [i.e. to the BigTable compute nodes the user has allocated] so that the user can't just load down the system with so many complex GC policies that the DC-scale Colossus cluster itself starts to fall behind its GC time budget.)
---
† Where by "decouple storage from compute", I mean:
• Each compute node gets a fixed-sized DAS diskset, like GCE local NVMe SSDs;
• each disk in that diskset gets partitioned up at some fixed ratio, into two virtual disksets;
• one virtual diskset gets RAID6'ed or ZFS'ed together, and is used as storage for non-Colossus-synced tablet-LDB nursery level SSTs;
• the other virtual diskset gets RAID0'ed or LVM-JBOD-ed together and is used as a bounded-size LFU read-through cache of the Colossus-synced tablets — just like BigQuery compute nodes presumably have.
(AFAIK the LDB nursery levels already get force-compacted into "full" [128MiB] Colossus-synced tablets after some quite-short finality interval, so it's not like this increases data loss likelihood by much. And BigTable doesn't guarantee durability for non-replicated keys anyway.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand your belief that One Zone implies less expensive, but I’m staunchly in favor of them having it in the name so people know that their data is in a single AZ. The storage class succinctly summarizes faster with lower availability.
Fair, how about instead of S3 Express they call it S3 Max (One Zone). It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to come up with good product names, just copy Apple. Though I suppose what happens when engineers are left up to the marketing. :-)