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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

#181

Post by huntaub »

aidos wrote: post #138
huntaub wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this because it allows me to highlight the parts of the system that I'm most excited about. The Regatta caching runs on our infrastructure, but it connects to buckets that our customers control. We read and write data into the customer's bucket in a regular, native (not bespoke) format -- so you can connect a Regatta file system directly to a bucket that already exists, with data in it, and use that data from…

Oh interesting! So you map exactly to the structure in s3? It’s like fuse backed by s3 with good performance?

That's exactly right -- I like to think that we deliver on the promise of those open-source S3 adapters. We provide enterprise-grade performance.

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

#182

Post by erichocean »

In 2024, you are better off dropping the file system abstraction entirely and just embracing object storage abstractions (and ideally, immutable write-once objects).

Source: personal experience, I've done the EFS path and the S3-like path within the same system, and the latter was much easier to develop for and troubleshoot performance. It's also far cheaper to operate.

You can have local caching, rapid "read what I wrote", etc. with very little engineering cost, no one at my company is dedicated to this because the abstraction is ridiculously simple:

1. It's object storage, not a file system. Embrace immutability.

2. When you write to S3, cache locally as well.

3. When you read from S3, check the cache first. Optionally cache locally on reads from S3.

4. Set cache sizes so you don't blow out local storage.

5. Tier your caches when needed to increase sharing. (Immutability makes this trivially safe.)

All that's left is to manage 'checked out files' which is pretty easy when almost all of them are immutable anyway.

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

#183

Post by huntaub »

bastloing wrote: post #166

That's pretty cool Anybody know of something similar for azure cloud?

We are looking at launching in Azure Cloud with support for Azure Blob Storage as the backend within the next 6 months. If there's a specific use case that you have, it would be helpful to share it with me at hleath [at] regattastorage.com so we can appropriately prioritize Azure against other cloud vendors and regions.

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

#184

Post by huntaub »

erichocean wrote: post #182

In 2024, you are better off dropping the file system abstraction entirely and just embracing object storage abstractions (and ideally, immutable write-once objects). Source: personal experience, I've done the EFS path and the S3-like path within the same system, and the latter was much easier to develop for and troubleshoot performance. It's also far cheaper to operate. You can have local caching, rapid "read what I…

I totally agree that we're continuing to see a trend of applications which are designed to work directly on S3.

However, like the S3 protocol, I think that the file protocol is cemented in time as something that we will be using 100 years from now. For example, most AI applications do still download data sets to local file system devices to actually load and use, this is why you see a lot of HPC workloads use things like Lustre. Postgres, SQLite, etc all use file system semantics to operate the database.

I totally respect folks who rewrite their applications to work directly with S3, but as you point out, it comes with a different set of challenges (around caching and chunking).

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

#185

Post by wongarsu »

nine_k wrote: post #155
_bare_metal wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, why not go bare metal in a managed colocation? Is that for the geographic spread? Or unpredictable load? Every few months of this spend is like buying a server Edit: back at my pc and checked, relevant bare metal is ~$500/m, amortized: https://baremetalsavings.com/c/LtxKMNj Edit 2: for 100tb..

Hiring someone who knows how to manage bare metal (with failover and stuff) may take time %)

You pay a datacenter to put it in a rack and add connect power and uplinks, then treat it like a big ec2 instance (minus the built-in firewall). Now you just need someone who knows how to secure an ec2 instance and run your preferred software there (with failover and stuff).

If you run a single-digit number of servers and replace them every 5 years you will probably never get a hardware failure. If you're unlucky and it still happens get someone to diagnose what's wrong, ship replacement parts to the data center and pay their tech to install them in your server.

Bare metal at scale is difficult. A small number of bare metal servers is easy. If your needs are average enough you can even just rent them so you don't have capital costs and aren't responsible for fixing hardware issues.

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

#188

Post by huntaub »

nixosbestos wrote: post #186

> NFSv3 (soon, our custom protocol). definitely the thing I want to hear more about. Also, I can't help shake the "what's the catch, how is no one else doing this, or are they doing it quietly?" feeling.

Trust me, I feel the same way. The problem with these things is that you end up building a company because you get so much conviction that what you're doing is the right thing for customers, and you end up shocked that this isn't the default for everyone.

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

#189

Post by huntaub »

ajbt200128 wrote: post #187

Wondering what the difference is between this and juicefs?

Great question! Full disclosure, answer copied from a another comment:

It's similar to JuiceFS, but JuiceFS writes and reads data from S3 in a proprietary block format. This means that you cannot connect JuiceFS to existing data sets in S3, and you cannot use data written through JuiceFS from the S3 API directly. On the other hand, Regatta reads and writes data to S3 using it's native format -- so you can do these things!

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

#190

Post by benatkin »

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…

The headline seems misleading, then.

rclone can work with AWS' different offerings, some of which at least partially address this: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-s3-express-one-z...

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