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Is spending time to optimize S3 in the manner you describe not a relevant cost?
We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
51–60 of 261 posts
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#52S3 certainly saves a lot of hassle, but in certain use cases, it really is prohibitively expensive. Has anyone tried self-hosted alternatives like MinIO or SeaweedFS? Or taken even more radical approaches? How do you balance between stability, maintenance overhead, and cost savings?
MinIO has moved away from having a free community fork, and I think it's base cost is close to $100k a year. I've been using Garage and been happy, but as a single dev and orders of magnitude smaller than the OP, so there are certainly edge cases I'm missing to compare the two.
I'm a fellow new Garage user. I have had a great time so far - but I also don't need much. My use case is to share data analysis results with a small team. I wanted something simple to manage that can provide an s3 like interface to work with off the shelf data analysis tools.
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#53[flagged]
Why do all your comments seem LLM generated? You do clearly have something to contribute, but it’s probably better to just write what you’re talking about than going through a LLM.
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#54[flagged]
S3 does more than 3x replica durability, as well, they use a form of erasure coding. They can lose several hard drives/servers/racks before your data becomes at risk, and have sufficient spare capacity to very quickly reproduce any missing shards before things become a problem.
That said, S3 seems like a really odd fit for their workload, plus their dependency on lifecycle rules seems utterly bizarre.
> Storage was a secondary tax. Even when processing finished in ~2 s, Lifecycle deletes meant paying for ~24 h of storage.
They decided not to implement the deletion logic in their service, so they'd just leave files sitting around for hours instead needlessly paying that storage cost? I wonder how much money they'd have saved if they just added that deletion logic.
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#55[flagged]
Why do all your comments seem LLM generated? You do clearly have something to contribute, but it’s probably better to just write what you’re talking about than going through a LLM.
I don't know about the commenter specifically but in general, using LLMs to format text is a game changer in the ability for English-as-Second-Language folks to contribute to tech conversations. While I get where some of the bias against anything LLM generated comes from, I would keep it for editorial content and not community comments to be fair to a global audience.
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
With s3, you cannot use ls, grep and other tools. > Save where? With what redundancy? With what access policies? With what backup strategy? With what network topology? With what storage equipment and file system and HVAC system and... Wow that's a lot to learn before using s3... I wonder how much it costs in salaries. > With what network topology? You don't need to care about this when using SSDs/HDDs. > With what ac…
> You don't need to care about this when using SSDs/HDDs. You do need to care when you move beyond a single server in a closet that runs your database, webserver and storage. > No risk of leaking files due to misconfigured cloud services. One misconfigured .htaccess file for example, could result in leaking files.
> One misconfigured .htaccess
First, I hope nobody is using Apache anymore, second, you typically store files outside of web directory.
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do all your comments seem LLM generated? You do clearly have something to contribute, but it’s probably better to just write what you’re talking about than going through a LLM.
I don't know about the commenter specifically but in general, using LLMs to format text is a game changer in the ability for English-as-Second-Language folks to contribute to tech conversations. While I get where some of the bias against anything LLM generated comes from, I would keep it for editorial content and not community comments to be fair to a global audience.
I’m worried that LLMs could facilitate cheap, scaled astroturfing.
I understand that people encounter discrimination based on English skill, and it makes sense that people will use LLMs to help with that, especially in a professional context. On the other hand, I’d instinctively be more trusting of the authenticity of a comment with some language errors than one that reads like it was generated by ChatGPT.
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do all your comments seem LLM generated? You do clearly have something to contribute, but it’s probably better to just write what you’re talking about than going through a LLM.
I don't know about the commenter specifically but in general, using LLMs to format text is a game changer in the ability for English-as-Second-Language folks to contribute to tech conversations. While I get where some of the bias against anything LLM generated comes from, I would keep it for editorial content and not community comments to be fair to a global audience.
It just makes everything sound bland and soulless. You don't know which part of the message actually comes from the user's brain and which part has been added/suggested by the LLM. The latter is not an original thought and it would be disingenuous to include it, but people do because it makes them look smarter. Meanwhile, on the other side, you might as well be talking to a LLM...
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#59In HN style, I'm going to diverge from the content and rant about the company:
Nanit needs this storage because they run cloud based baby cameras. Every Nanit user is uploading video and audio of their home/baby live to Nanit without any E2EE. It's a hot mic sending anything you say near it to the cloud.
Their hardware essentially requires a subscription to use, even though it costs $200/camera. You must spend an additional $200 on a Nanit floor stand if you want sleep tracking. This is purely a software limitation since there's plenty of other ways to get an overhead camera mount. (I'm curious how they even detect if you're using the stand since it's just a USB-C cable. Maybe etags?)
Of course Nanit is a popular and successful product that many parents swear by. It just pains me to see cloud based in-home audio/video storage being so normalized. Self-hosted video isn't that hard but no one makes a baby-monitor centric solution. I'm sure the cloud based video storage model will continue to be popular because it's easy, but also because it helps justifies a recurring subscription.
edit: just noticed an irony in my comment. I'm ranting about Nanit locking users into their 3rd party cloud video storage, and the article is about Nanit's engineering team moving off a 3rd party (S3) and self-hosting their own storage. Props to them for getting off S3.
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#60[flagged]
There are more options than using S3 or completely rolling your own on JBOD. For example, you could use a cheaper S3-compatible cloud (such as Backblaze) or you can deploy a project such as Ceph.