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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

#161

Post by freedomben »

garganzol wrote: post #141

I used the same approach based on Rclone for a long time. I wondered what makes Regatta Storage different than Rclone. Here is the answer: "When performing mutating operations on the file system (including writes, renames, and directory changes), Regatta first stages this data on its high-speed caching layer to provide strong consistency to other file clients." [0]. Rclone, on the contrary, has no layer that would gu…

Thanks, this was my thought as well. I use and love rclone and it wasn't immediately clear what this offered above that

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

#162

Post by lijok »

huntaub wrote: post #149
convivialdingo wrote: post #144

Wow, looks like a great product! That's a great idea to use NFS as the protocol. I honestly hadn't thought of that. Perfect. For IBM, I wrote a crypto filesystem that works similarly in concept, except it was a kernel filesystem. We crypto split the blocks up into 4 parts, stored into cache. A background daemon listened to events and sync'ed blocks to S3 orchestrated with a shared journal. It's pure magic when you mo…

> It's pure magic when you mount a filesystem on clean machine and all your data is "just there." I totally agree! I am hoping that Regatta can power a future where teams don't need more than ~8 GiB of local storage for their operating system, and can store the rest on something like Regatta to get rid of the waste of overprovisioned block volumes.

That would sell like hot cakes to the public sector.

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

#163

Post by Jugurtha »

huntaub wrote: post #11
krawczstef wrote: post #9

Does this compete with Minio?

I don't think so, I see them as complementary. MinIO is great when you have downstream applications which speak the S3 API that need acceleration of that data. Regatta is designed for applications which speak file semantics (think, application logging, storing corpuses of training data, or state) that doesn't run on the S3 API. Regatta actually supports MinIO as an S3-compatible backend for your file system!

I think it's complementary as well, even more so after MinIO deprecating its Gateway and Filesystem modes a couple of years ago. MinIO is "S3 compatible" object storage, so technically, MinIO users should be able to use your product to have a file-system like experience on their buckets and objects, although you're using IAM and there might be a need either for your client to handle pure S3 credentials, either for a third-party plugin to your client to do that. It could be a good opportunity to piggyback on MinIO's userbase.

We had built an MLOps platform[0] a few years ago and enabled users to use their S3 buckets in a "file system like" manner. This made it possible for them not to have to know or write S3 specific code in their Jupyter notebooks as most people in the industry did with boto3, which also forced them to write code (say using TensorFlow) in a certain way for training to consume the files, err, objects. It was a mess, and we removed that for notebooks that could run the same way on a laptop or on the platform, even with the shell kernel so people could explore objects like files. MLFlow could work on a filesystem or on S3, but it had no authentication, so we built around that to know which user/experiment produced which artifact.

MinIO had a Gateway that was deprecated. We didn't use it much and they didn't have an admin client at the time, so I rolled one up to orchestrate the thing.

One way I did it that hook into users' compute and storage as opposed to offering storage/compute was for two reasons:

- Organizations already had their data somewhere with established policies. Getting them to move that data is very hard (CISO, CTO, IT, legal, engineers). Friction would have been huge.

- Organizations already had budgeted compute and storage, they may have had contracts/discounts/credits with cloud providers and it didn't make sense to ask them to make a decision on budgeting for another solution.

- A design principle of having the product being able to die without leaving the users scrambling to exfil/migrate data.

One way to do it was to handle FUSE, and your mileage may vary (s3fs-fuse, goofys, etc). Amazon has released Mountpoint last year[1], and one question you'll get asked is why use Regatta when I could use Mountpoint?

Less friction for engineers and execs.

In any way, congratulations on the launch, man!

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230325150132/https://iko.ai/

[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/mountpoint-for-amazon-s3-ge...

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

#164

Post by wanderingmind »

huntaub wrote: post #148
garganzol wrote: post #141

I used the same approach based on Rclone for a long time. I wondered what makes Regatta Storage different than Rclone. Here is the answer: "When performing mutating operations on the file system (including writes, renames, and directory changes), Regatta first stages this data on its high-speed caching layer to provide strong consistency to other file clients." [0]. Rclone, on the contrary, has no layer that would gu…

This is exactly right, and something that we think is particularly important for applications that care about data consistency. Often times, we see that customers want to be able to quickly hand off tasks from one instance to another which can be incredibly complex if you don't have guarantees that your new operations will be seen by the second instance!

Might be useful to show the differences with Rclone, s3fs as a table to make it obvious

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

#165

Post by secabeen »

huntaub wrote: post #51
count wrote: post #45

I don't see any other question about it, so maybe I just missed the obvious answer, but how do you handle POSIX ACLs? If the data is stored as an object in S3, but exposed via filesystem, where are you keeping (if at all?) the filesystem ACLs and metadata? Also, NFSv3 and not 4?

Great call out. Some kinds of data, like ACLs and specific kinds of metadata, don't live in S3. Full disclosure, we don't support ACLs today (but plan to soon). We keep file system metadata in the durable cache. For some files (where users haven't changed permissions, etc), we are able to release that cached metadata when the file is no longer in use. For other files (where permissions have been changed by the user),…

Do you pay for metadata accesses? Does running a `find` across the filesystem cost anything? What about system calls that don't transfer data? Can I move or rename a file without paying to copy and then delete the associated S3 object?

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

#167

Post by jedberg »

huntaub wrote: post #119
jedberg wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious as to why you would want to build that yourself when so many solutions already exist (Supabase, NeonDB, AWS Aurora or RDS, etc.)?

One of my hopes for Regatta is that we're able to power the next generation of these data platforms. These things work because the designers had specialized storage knowledge that allowed them to carefully build serverless data products. I hope that Regatta is generic enough to allow anyone to build a serverless data product moving forward, without having to think about their storage infrastructure.

That makes a lot of sense. If you eliminate the need for storage expertise the problem becomes a lot easier!

BTW I sent you an email.

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

#168

Post by random3 »

huntaub wrote: post #152
random3 wrote: post #145

In (March?) 2007 (correction 2008) myself and two other engineers in front of Bruce Chizen - Adobe's CEO in a small conference room in Bucharest demoed a photo taken with an iPhone automagically showing as a file on a Mac. I implemented the local FUSE talking to Ozzy - Adobe's distributed object store back then, using an equivalent of a Linux inode structure. It worked like a charm and if I remember correctly it took…

The funny thing about storage is that all of the problems are the same! Ultimately, there is no problem that cannot be solved with caching, journaling, write-ahead logging, etc. I think what makes the problem space so interesting is how a million different products can make a million different trade offs with these tools to deliver on their customer needs. File systems are awesome.

> The funny thing about storage is that all of the problems are the same!

they are all the same and they are all more than what would at the surface seem that it's "just files" the whole OS, especially Linux/UNIX is "just files" and if you look deeper at databases you can see how it boils down to the file formats (something that was visible with LevelDB but maybe less so with RocksDB, I guess)

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

#170

Post by huntaub »

wanderingmind wrote: post #164
huntaub wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right, and something that we think is particularly important for applications that care about data consistency. Often times, we see that customers want to be able to quickly hand off tasks from one instance to another which can be incredibly complex if you don't have guarantees that your new operations will be seen by the second instance!

Might be useful to show the differences with Rclone, s3fs as a table to make it obvious

I agree, I plan to put up a table soon.
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