Has anyone here a usecase which would perform better with this new S3 Express Tier? And a second question, would it be worth the 8x times surcharge?
A cache with large blobs (images, etc)
S3 Express Is All You Need
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Re: S3 Express Is All You Need
#12Most production storage systems/databases built on top of S3 spend a significant amount of effort building an SSD/memory caching tier to make them performant enough for production (e.g. on top of RocksDB). But it's not easy to keep it in sync with blob...
Even with the cache, the cold query latency lower-bound to S3 is subject to ~50ms roundtrips [0]. To build a performant system, you have to tightly control roundtrips. S3 Express changes that equation dramatically, as S3 Express approaches HDD random read speeds (single-digit ms), so we can build production systems that don't need an SSD cache—just the zero-copy, deserialized in-memory cache.
Many systems will probably continue to have an SSD cache (~100 us random reads), but now MVPs can be built without it, and cold query latency goes down dramatically. That's a big deal
We're currently building a vector database on top of object storage, so this is extremely timely for us... I hope GCS ships this ASAP. [1]
[0]: https://github.com/sirupsen/napkin-math [1]: https://turbopuffer.com/
Re: S3 Express Is All You Need
#13I don't understand why EFS never gets major shout outs - it's way better than S3: systems can mount it as a drive, shared across systems, already has had super low latency... Not sure what s3 express is really useful for if EFS already exists.
Re: S3 Express Is All You Need
#14I don't understand why EFS never gets major shout outs - it's way better than S3: systems can mount it as a drive, shared across systems, already has had super low latency... Not sure what s3 express is really useful for if EFS already exists.
EFS is really expensive and has terrible latency with small files in my experience
Re: S3 Express Is All You Need
#15I don't understand why EFS never gets major shout outs - it's way better than S3: systems can mount it as a drive, shared across systems, already has had super low latency... Not sure what s3 express is really useful for if EFS already exists.
EFS is really expensive and has terrible latency with small files in my experience
Yeah the main reason is that it's incredibly expensive. You can improve performance by allocating ahead of time but NFS has never been at its best when working with a bunch of tiny files.
Re: S3 Express Is All You Need
#16I don't understand why EFS never gets major shout outs - it's way better than S3: systems can mount it as a drive, shared across systems, already has had super low latency... Not sure what s3 express is really useful for if EFS already exists.
EFS is really expensive and has terrible latency with small files in my experience
Do you have any more details you can share about the performance of EFS? I've never met anyone who has actually used it in anger.
Re: S3 Express Is All You Need
#17I don't understand why EFS never gets major shout outs - it's way better than S3: systems can mount it as a drive, shared across systems, already has had super low latency... Not sure what s3 express is really useful for if EFS already exists.
EFS is really expensive and has terrible latency with small files in my experience
Note that EFS One Zone is priced the same as S3 Express One Zone with similar latency. One isn't better or worse than the other, it only depends on what kind of access your application needs.
Re: S3 Express Is All You Need
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
EFS is really expensive and has terrible latency with small files in my experience
Do you have any more details you can share about the performance of EFS? I've never met anyone who has actually used it in anger.
Throughput scales with the amount of data in it, it is in the docs. So depending on the application, even if latency is better, the speeds are atrocious at lower volumes of persisted data.
Re: S3 Express Is All You Need
#19> However, the new storage class does open up an exciting new opportunity for all modern data infrastructure: the ability to tune an individual workload for low latency and higher cost or higher latency and lower cost with the exact same architecture and code. I get it, but at the same time that is also what you lost when you locked yourself in with a particular vendor.
Except this has uniform billing, security, locality, monitoring, tools, etc
I did mention vendor lock in?
Re: S3 Express Is All You Need
#20I don't understand why EFS never gets major shout outs - it's way better than S3: systems can mount it as a drive, shared across systems, already has had super low latency... Not sure what s3 express is really useful for if EFS already exists.
EFS exists if you don't care much about spend and performance while having to forklift a POSIX compliant use case into AWS for persistent data.