111–120 of 142 posts
Didn't Microsoft blame their customers for not running updates and using AV? Gosh I guess MS did a fine job. Customers were to blame.
Just like those s3 buckets. Customers ignored the warnings ...
> When we moved S3 to a strong consistency model, the customer reception was stronger than any of us expected. This feels like one of those Apple-like stories about inventing and discovering an amazing, brand new feature that delighted customers but not mentioning the motivating factor of the competing products that already had it. A more honest sentence might have been "After years of customers complaining that the…
I mainly use GCP but keep hearing how great AWS is in comparison. Imagine my surprise when porting some GCS code to S3 last year and realizing there is no way to get consistency guarantees without external lock service.
S3 is up there as one of my favorite tech products ever. Over the years I've used it for all sorts of things but most recently I've been using it to roll my own DB backup system. One of the things that shocks me about the system is the level of object durability. A few years ago I was taking an AWS certification course and learned that their durability number means that one can expect to loose data about once every 1…
I did a GCP training a while back, and the anecdote from one of the trainers was that the Cloud Storage team (GCP’s S3-compatible product) hadn’t lost a single byte of data since GCS had existed as a product. Crazy at that scale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mainly use GCP but keep hearing how great AWS is in comparison. Imagine my surprise when porting some GCS code to S3 last year and realizing there is no way to get consistency guarantees without external lock service.
That would surprise me too considering read-after-write consistency came to S3 like 5 years ago?
I would hope that S3 could introduce a change in the operation of said fundamental building block (immutable object), rather than just slap an existing downstream abstraction. That's not what I call design for simplicity. As an external observer, I would think that's internal amazon moat management with some co-branding strategy.
I have a feeling that economies of scale have a point of diminishing returns. At what point does it become more costly and complicated to store your data on S3 versus just maintaining a server with RAID disks somewhere? S3 is an engineering marvel, but it's an insanely complicated backend architecture just to store some files.
One interesting thing about S3 is the vast scale of it. E.g. if you need to store 3 PB of data you might need 150 HDDs + redundancy, but if you store it on S3 it's chopped up and put on tens of thousands of HDDs, which helps with IOPS and throughput. Of course that's shared with others, which is why smart placement is key, so that hot objects are spread out. Some details in https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2023/0…
Most people don't even think about it. But authenticating trillions of operations per second is why AWS works. And the accounting and billing. Anyone that does authentication knows how hard it is. At AWS' scale it's well, the pinnacle of distributed systems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would surprise me too considering read-after-write consistency came to S3 like 5 years ago?
IIRC (it has been a while) the difference is that on Amazon it can only be consistent within a region whereas on GCS I believe even multi-region buckets offer strong consistency.
S3 is the simplest CRUD app you could create. It's essentially just the 4 functions of C.R.U.D done to a file. Most problems in tech are not that simple. Note: not knocking the service. just pointing out not all things are so inherently basic (and valuable at the same time).
A file system is simple. Open, read, close. Most tech problems are not that simple. How hard could a filesystem be?
I have a feeling that economies of scale have a point of diminishing returns. At what point does it become more costly and complicated to store your data on S3 versus just maintaining a server with RAID disks somewhere? S3 is an engineering marvel, but it's an insanely complicated backend architecture just to store some files.
> At what point does it become more costly and complicated to store your data on S3 versus just maintaining a server with RAID disks somewhere? It's more costly immediately. S3 storage prices are above what you would pay even for triply redundant media and you have to pay for data transfer at a very high rate to both send and receive data to the public internet. It's far less complicated though. You just create a buc…
I’ve paid pennies a year to store data in s3 for the better part of 5 years. Can’t even buy a hdd with what I’ve spent on s3.