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In S3 simplicity is table stakes

allthingsdistributed.com

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Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#121

Post by timewizard »

snoman wrote: post #120
timewizard wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Care to elaborate? What you’re saying doesn’t match my experience. 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.

The per GB price on S3 is higher than on bulk HDDs. This is easily observed. What you are saying is your data storage needs don't even justify a single HDD. This is a scaling issue and not a pricing issue.

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#122

Post by jimbokun »

alberth wrote: post #26

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).

The point of the article is that making a service at S3's scale with such a simple API exposed to the end user, without exposing the provisioning and durability and security and performance to make it all work...

...is very difficult.

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#123

Post by marsovo »

mannyv wrote: post #113
angulardragon03 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, google cloud has destroyed entire accounts, but I suppose that's not a storage failure per se.

Here's the link to that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40304666

Moral of the story: the "technical part" of things is not the end of the story

Alternative moral: The 3-2-1 backup rule of thumb is still alive and well (is your cloud account a single point of failure?)

Related: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2179073/murder-in-the-amaz...

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#124

Post by snoman »

CaffeineLD50 wrote: post #111

I wish they'd comment on how their service keeps leaking massive amounts of data that isn't supposed to. 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 ...

Not sure what you’re getting at. An S3 bucket out-of-the-box is secure and can’t leak/be accessed publicly.

There’s legitimate use cases for making a bucket public.

What are you advocating for?

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#125

Post by marsovo »

golly_ned wrote: post #66
alberth wrote: post #26

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?

Erm, most file systems allow you to change data too, right? Hence S3 is emphatically not a file system.

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#126

Post by snoman »

timewizard wrote: post #121
snoman wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate? What you’re saying doesn’t match my experience. 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.

The per GB price on S3 is higher than on bulk HDDs. This is easily observed. What you are saying is your data storage needs don't even justify a single HDD. This is a scaling issue and not a pricing issue.

Oh, so “it’s more costly immediately” actually meant “it’s more costly once you’re storing over some threshold of data.” Ok. I can get behind that.

I don’t think it’s so easily observed at scale though, because at that point it’s hardly just the hdd cost anymore. It’s the hdd, server/compute, cabling, cooling, power, facilities, security, cabling, maintenance.

The TCO of data storage isn't just the drive - it just so happens that it’s still less than the cost of a drive up to some threshold. I don’t know if anyone having done a full cost model comparison. Everything I’ve ever seen assumes the data center is free.

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#127

Post by CaffeineLD50 »

snoman wrote: post #124
CaffeineLD50 wrote: post #111

I wish they'd comment on how their service keeps leaking massive amounts of data that isn't supposed to. 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 ...

Not sure what you’re getting at. An S3 bucket out-of-the-box is secure and can’t leak/be accessed publicly. There’s legitimate use cases for making a bucket public. What are you advocating for?

A good security model doesn't let stupid people do stupid things with warnings. Stupid people ignore warnings.

A good model protects stupid people from themselves.

A password model that says "you MUST have a strong password" protects stupid people from their own stupidity. A model that says you can use bad passwords if you click through warnings is a shite model. Stupid people ignore warnings.

Seriously.

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#128

Post by ginko »

PantaloonFlames wrote: post #108
ginko wrote: post #7

Would have been good if they mentioned they meant Amazon S3. It took me a while to figure out what this was about. Initially I thought this was about S3 standby mode.

All things distributed - the source of the headline - is a blog written by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.

Only people in the web dev niche would know this.

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#129

Post by antonvs »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #96

> 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…

You get this same pattern with a lot of stories about software. Features are often implemented in a way that’s simple for the developers, but not really a great fit for what’s actually needed. Then typically some story is given to justify why the resulting limitations or usability issues are actually a good thing.

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#130

Post by throawayonthe »

jalk wrote: post #76
pavlov wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photoshop, PDF and Excel are all products that were truly much better than their competitors at the time of their introduction. Every file format accumulates cruft over thirty years, especially when you have hundreds of millions of users and you have to expand the product for use cases the original developers never imagined. But that doesn’t mean the success wasn’t justified.

PDF is not a product. I get what you are day but I can’t say that I’ve ever liked Adobe Acrobat

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