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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

#21

Post by memco »

huntaub wrote: post #8
Jayakumark wrote: post #5

How does this compare to https://github.com/awslabs/mountpoint-s3 ?

Thanks for the question! Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is a FUSE layer that doesn't support full POSIX semantics. For example, you can't use Mountpoint for Amazon S3 for random writes to existing files, appends, or renames. This means that you have to carefully instrument your application to understand whether or not it's compatible with Mountpoint, which can be error-prone. Regatta, on the other hand, provides full POSIX…

Does Regatta require a local disk sized for the entire file to support random writes? One problem I’ve seen is that we have set up instances with a modest local disk but then work with files for which we need to pull the whole file into a local cache modify some parts and then push the full result back into s3. It would be helpful to have a way to work with s3 as though it were posix without having to match the local disk size to the largest file we might need to process.

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

#22

Post by huntaub »

mr90210 wrote: post #17

That’s so nice see, because in the few days I had been tinkering with the concept of file system + blob storage but I had hard time com up with use-cases other than an unlimited Dropbox where you own the storage and truly pay as you go.

I think that "owning the storage" is such an important part of this. I'm excited that folks who use this will continue to have access to their data directly through S3, so if they ever decide to move off of Regatta, all their data is still right there. This is also important at large companies which already have compliance and governance workflows that connect to data in S3 -- Regatta enables them to continue to use those workflows without having to think about another primary storage system.

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

#23

Post by mdaniel »

I dunno if this is considered off-topic, since it's commentary about the website, but that's twice in the past week I've seen a launch website that must have used a template or something because almost all the links in the footer are href="#". If you don't have Careers, Privacy Policy, Terms, or an opinion about Cookies, then just nuke those links

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

#24

Post by huntaub »

fermigier wrote: post #20

TL;DR: is this a cloud service or an on-premise thing?

This is a managed cloud service. If you're interested in using Regatta on-premises, I'd love to hear from you -- shoot me some mail at hleath [at] regattastorage.com

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

#25

Post by huntaub »

mdaniel wrote: post #23

I dunno if this is considered off-topic, since it's commentary about the website, but that's twice in the past week I've seen a launch website that must have used a template or something because almost all the links in the footer are href="#". If you don't have Careers, Privacy Policy, Terms, or an opinion about Cookies, then just nuke those links

Great call out -- we'll get that done. Thanks!

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

#26

Post by huntaub »

crest wrote: post #19
jeffbee wrote: post #7

People have been throwing out "POSIX" distributed file systems for a long time but this claim usually raises more questions than it answers. Especially since clients access it via NFSv3, which has extremely weak semantics and leaves most POSIX filesystem features unimplemented.

You can implement a single client NFSv3 server that provides stronger than expected (of NFSv3) guarantees and if you implement the "optional" companion protocols it should come closer to local filesystem semantics than most network filesystems. What would be neat about such a solution is that you can run the server either locally or remotely (same site, high bandwidth, low latency) and at the same time clients would…

I think this is exactly right, but there are lots of people who don't want to manage their own NFS servers -- that's who we're targeting with Regatta. Notably, I think that v4 delegations gets you close but not close enough to the performance that we're looking for. For example, you can't get a delegation for a directory (which means that you're still doing round trips for CREATE and UNLINK), which seems to be the case even with "nocto". But, I need to spend more time playing around with that.

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

#27

Post by scottlamb »

huntaub wrote: post #8
Jayakumark wrote: post #5

How does this compare to https://github.com/awslabs/mountpoint-s3 ?

Thanks for the question! Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is a FUSE layer that doesn't support full POSIX semantics. For example, you can't use Mountpoint for Amazon S3 for random writes to existing files, appends, or renames. This means that you have to carefully instrument your application to understand whether or not it's compatible with Mountpoint, which can be error-prone. Regatta, on the other hand, provides full POSIX…

> For example, you can't use Mountpoint for Amazon S3 for random writes to existing files, appends, or renames.

Can you support these operations with the expected semantics and performance?

If the application makes a one-byte change to a giant file and calls fdatasync, what happens? Do you re-upload the entire file to S3?

How do you handle a rename? Applications commonly do this for atomic replacement on POSIX and expect three properties from this operation:

* fast. * destination always points to either the original or new afterward (on success or failure); no scenario at which it's lost/truncated. * no extra storage used (on success or failure).

Do you guarantee any of those? How? I don't see an obvious way from the S3 HTTP API.

Given that POSIX API doesn't support things like arbitrary per-operation deadlines/timeouts, do you think it's suitable as a distributed filesystem API at all? Why?

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

#29

Post by huntaub »

scottlamb wrote: post #27
huntaub wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the question! Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is a FUSE layer that doesn't support full POSIX semantics. For example, you can't use Mountpoint for Amazon S3 for random writes to existing files, appends, or renames. This means that you have to carefully instrument your application to understand whether or not it's compatible with Mountpoint, which can be error-prone. Regatta, on the other hand, provides full POSIX…

> For example, you can't use Mountpoint for Amazon S3 for random writes to existing files, appends, or renames. Can you support these operations with the expected semantics and performance? If the application makes a one-byte change to a giant file and calls fdatasync, what happens? Do you re-upload the entire file to S3? How do you handle a rename? Applications commonly do this for atomic replacement on POSIX and ex…

The tl;dr of this is -- yes. We have a durable caching layer that we use to stage writes before we asynchronously replicate them to S3. This means that we are able to quickly (and provide strong read-after-write consistency to other file system clients.

Once the operation is stored in our durable cache, then we update your S3 bucket to match what the file system expects. This generally takes around a minute, but could take longer depending on the number of S3 operations a file operation translates to (for example, a directory rename requires that CopyObject each object in the directory in S3).

I think that the POSIX API is to here to stay (like the S3 API). I agree that it would be better to have timeouts and deadlines, but I don't think that those make it impossible to provide a good distributed file system experience on POSIX (look at Amazon's EFS, Oracle's FSS, Google's FileStore, etc). It just makes the bar for availability higher.

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

#30

Post by huntaub »

memco wrote: post #21
huntaub wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the question! Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is a FUSE layer that doesn't support full POSIX semantics. For example, you can't use Mountpoint for Amazon S3 for random writes to existing files, appends, or renames. This means that you have to carefully instrument your application to understand whether or not it's compatible with Mountpoint, which can be error-prone. Regatta, on the other hand, provides full POSIX…

Does Regatta require a local disk sized for the entire file to support random writes? One problem I’ve seen is that we have set up instances with a modest local disk but then work with files for which we need to pull the whole file into a local cache modify some parts and then push the full result back into s3. It would be helpful to have a way to work with s3 as though it were posix without having to match the local…

This is exactly the problem that we solve! You don't need any local disk on your EC2 instance in order to use Regatta or work with data in S3. Our high-speed caching layer plays the role as this local disk for you, so that you can work with data sets that are hundreds of TiBs, even if you only have a 20 GiB EBS volume on your instance.
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