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Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3

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Re: Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3

#111

Post by aborsy »

ignoramous wrote: post #4
Twirrim wrote: post #2

> That’s a bit error rate of 1 in 10^15 requests. In the real world, we see that blade of grass get missed pretty frequently – and it’s actually something we need to account for in S3. One of the things I remember from my time at AWS was conversations about how 1 in a billion events end up being a daily occurrence when you're operating at S3 scale. Things that you'd normally mark off as so wildly improbable it's not…

James Hamilton, AWS' chief architect, wrote about this phenomena in 2017: At scale, rare events aren't rare ; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14038044

This phenomenon is just multiplication of the sample size (scale) times a probability (rare).

Re: Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3

#115

Post by danpalmer »

anyoneamous wrote: post #37
Twirrim wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glacier is a big "keep your lips sealed" one. I'd love AWS to talk about everything there, and the entire journey it was on because it is truly fascinating.

My impression is that the ambiguity gives them freedom to implement in different ways across different regions and over time. The original Glacier was very clearly tape, but given the instant retrieval capabilities the newer S3-Glacier tiers are most likely just low-margin HDDs, maybe with some dynamic powering on and off of drives/servers.

I’m sure it’s a mix. Back when it launched there were a number of rumours about it being Blu-Ray based. They had similar capacity for the space used compared to tapes, were considered very physically stable storage mediums, but had long access time as they would need to be physically moved, like tape, explaining the retrieval times.

Re: Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3

#116

Post by ddorian43 »

jl6 wrote: post #18

Great to see Amazon employees being allowed to talk openly about how S3 works behind the scenes. I would love to hear more about how Glacier works. As far as I know, they have never revealed what the underlying storage medium is, leading to a lot of wild speculation (tape? offline HDDs? custom HDDs?).

Just look at other clouds. I doubt amazon is doing anything special. At least they don't reflect any special pricing.

Re: Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3

#117

Post by maweki »

aborsy wrote: post #111
ignoramous wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

James Hamilton, AWS' chief architect, wrote about this phenomena in 2017: At scale, rare events aren't rare ; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14038044

This phenomenon is just multiplication of the sample size (scale) times a probability (rare).

It shows that, however improbable, people do win the lottery.

It's good to be reminded of that, if you've been trained for years, not to play the lottery because you personally won't ever win.

In this case, the Cloud vendor is the lottery organizer and they indeed need to plan for people winning.

Re: Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3

#118

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

Spivak wrote: post #55
ttymck wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with both halves of your comment, but I realized I can't identify the connection between S3 oauth and data sovereignty. Could you elaborate?

So the idea would be that you have an account with AWS (or realistically a more consumer friendly service that's Amazon branded) where all your data lives. Then when you use say Dropbox you can pick "Use my own storage" and grant Dropbox via OAuth the ability to write to /dropbox in your bucket and all your files would live there instead of Dropbox's servers. Lots of the data sovereignty solutions also include a data…

Isn't this essentially how the Dropbox API already works (for apps that support using it)? I've used many apps over the years that offer this option alongside some alternatives.

Re: Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3

#119

Post by kuchenbecker »

epistasis wrote: post #7

Working in genomics, I've dealt with lots of petabyte data stores over the past decade. Having used AWS S3, GCP GCS, and a raft of storage systems for collocated hardware (Ceph, Gluster, and an HP system whose name I have blocked from my memory), I have no small amount of appreciation for the effort that goes into operating these sorts of systems. And the benefits of sharing disk IOPs with untold numbers of other cus…

As someone in this area: we very much want to make your EiB of data to feel local. It's hard and I'm sorry we only have 3.5 9's of read availability.

Re: Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3

#120

Post by ddorian43 »

g9yuayon wrote: post #105

S3 is a truly amazing piece of technology. It offers peace of mind (well, almost), zero operations, and practically unlimited bandwidth for at least analytics workload. Indeed, it's so good that there has not been much progress in building an open-source alternative to S3. There seems not much activity in the Hadoop community. I have yet heard any company who uses RADOS on Ceph to handle PBs of data for analytics wor…

> There seems not much activity in the Hadoop community

There is apache ozone https://ozone.apache.org/

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