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Launch HN: Regatta Storage (YC F24) – Turn S3 into a local-like, POSIX cloud FS

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Re: Launch HN: Regatta Storage (YC F24) – Turn S3 into a local-like, POSIX cloud FS

#121

Post by yawnxyz »

oh interesting, I'd love to mount this to Finder on Mac, and load a bunch of massive bioinformatics databases on there and treat it like another folder

I'm also using Cloudflare R2 (S3 compatible) and would love for that to work out of the box

Re: Launch HN: Regatta Storage (YC F24) – Turn S3 into a local-like, POSIX cloud FS

#122

Post by huntaub »

koolba wrote: post #116
huntaub wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the question! > How do you handle the cache server crashing before syncing to S3? Do the cache servers have local disk as well? Our caching layer is highly durable, which is (in my opinion) the key for doing this kind of staging. This means that once a write is complete to Regatta, we guarantee that it will eventually complete on S3. For this reason, server crashes and intermittent S3 availability issues a…

Is it fair to say this is best suited for small files that will be written infrequently? There’s no partial write for s3 so editing a small range of a 1 GiB file would repeatedly upload the full file to the backing s3 right? Or is the s3 representation not the same hierarchy as the presented mount point? (ie something opaque like a log structured / append only chunked list)

It's hard to define "best", and in many cases, the answers to these questions depend heavily on the workload and the caching parameters (how long do we wait before flushing to S3, etc). We are designed to provide good file system performance, even if customers are repeatedly writing small pieces of data to a 1 GiB file, so "best" in this case is a question of whether or not it's cost efficient.

Re: Launch HN: Regatta Storage (YC F24) – Turn S3 into a local-like, POSIX cloud FS

#123

Post by huntaub »

yawnxyz wrote: post #121

oh interesting, I'd love to mount this to Finder on Mac, and load a bunch of massive bioinformatics databases on there and treat it like another folder I'm also using Cloudflare R2 (S3 compatible) and would love for that to work out of the box

I know a lot of folks have asked me for local support, and while I can share that this would work from OS X -- it's not something that I would recommend doing outside of a data center because the semantics of a networked file system on a sporadic internet connection (when compared to a data center) aren't great -- unless you're doing something higher level like Dropbox. However, it's something we're considering for next year.

Re: Launch HN: Regatta Storage (YC F24) – Turn S3 into a local-like, POSIX cloud FS

#124

Post by huntaub »

bobnamob wrote: post #113
huntaub wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All connected file system clients see strong, read-after-write consistency. Most file operations are synchronized to S3 within a few minutes of completion.

Do you do anything to handle/detect write conflicts?

Write conflicts between the file system and S3 should be rare (by definition, applications shouldn't yet be designed to do this because Regatta doesn't exist). We do some tracking of the object etag to at least throw an alert if we find that something unexpected has happened, and we're looking at the best UX to expose that to customers soon.

Re: Launch HN: Regatta Storage (YC F24) – Turn S3 into a local-like, POSIX cloud FS

#125

Post by huntaub »

inopinatus wrote: post #115

I rejected EFS as a common caching and shared files layer, despite being technologically an excellent fit for my stack, because it is astronomically expensive. The value created didn’t match the cost. When I got in touch about that, I was confronted with a wall of TCO papers, which tells me the product managers evidently believe their target segment to be Gartner-following corporate drones. This was a further deterre…

It's certainly my hope to be cost effective, but I understand the worry and I'm sorry that you had that experience with the PMs of that time. At the end of the day, I see my target customers as those who aren't interested in running their own infrastructure and having to manage availability and durability (in memcached case, things like needing to pre-warm the cache). I understand that it still may be possible to be more cost effective if you're willing to trade off ease of use for dealing with those other concerns.

Re: Launch HN: Regatta Storage (YC F24) – Turn S3 into a local-like, POSIX cloud FS

#126

Post by JZL003 »

yawnxyz wrote: post #121

oh interesting, I'd love to mount this to Finder on Mac, and load a bunch of massive bioinformatics databases on there and treat it like another folder I'm also using Cloudflare R2 (S3 compatible) and would love for that to work out of the box

You can use rclone mount, depends on how much you're flipping through files or actually doing lots of IO

I wouldn't want to host fastqs or something and use this for alignment, but for spot checking raw fastqs it could be nice

Re: Launch HN: Regatta Storage (YC F24) – Turn S3 into a local-like, POSIX cloud FS

#127

Post by therealmarv »

JZL003 wrote: post #126
yawnxyz wrote: post #121

oh interesting, I'd love to mount this to Finder on Mac, and load a bunch of massive bioinformatics databases on there and treat it like another folder I'm also using Cloudflare R2 (S3 compatible) and would love for that to work out of the box

You can use rclone mount, depends on how much you're flipping through files or actually doing lots of IO I wouldn't want to host fastqs or something and use this for alignment, but for spot checking raw fastqs it could be nice

This reminds me on using rclone mount on Terrabytes of data and I mostly wanted some "smaller" files between 200kb-1.5MB in a single directory. I made rclone mount significantly faster when rclone mount caches into a Ramdisk (there is a free tool to make Ramdisks on macOS too).

Re: Launch HN: Regatta Storage (YC F24) – Turn S3 into a local-like, POSIX cloud FS

#129

Post by huntaub »

hitekker wrote: post #128

This looks quite compelling. But it's not clear how it handles file update conflicts. For example: if User A updates File X on one computer, and User B updates File X on another computer, what does the final file look like in S3?

Hey there, our file system is strongly consistent for all connected file system clients. For example, if User A and User B are both connected via Regatta, then this works like any other NFS file system (in that they can use file locks, atomic renames or other techniques to ensure that one write wins). However, if User A and User B are accessing the data through different protocols (for example User A is using Regatta and User B is accessing the data through S3), then it's possible to get undefined behavior by attempting to simultaneously update the same piece of data from both places. We think that these applications are rare, and (almost by definition) likely don't exist right now. For the most part, customers use file storage as a "stage" in a broader workflow (for example, customers may ingest data through S3 and then process it on a file system), and that is totally consistent.
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