201–210 of 338 posts
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The "fancy" option here is trying to act S3 to act like database instead of simple blob storage...
I'm only wildly guessing here, but most likely the "cloud storage" backing all those managed databases is actually S3-like blob storage under the hood.
Aren't these storage prices absurd? Please let me know if I'm misunderstanding.
While on the price, patio11 (Patrick) has written an article about tarsnap’s issues more than nine years ago (April 2014). One of the suggestions was to raise prices, IIRC. It’s a long post, but you can read it [1] and the HN post [2] from that time.
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Right I've considered that. It is however limited to like 7 snapshots. The thing is that tarsnap deduplicates over arbitrarily long time periods, letting me make arbitrarily long staggered sequences of retained archives. Perhaps I should really reconsider if I really need such long lived archives, but it is hard to bring myself to drop them.
You can do the same with rsync, they just charge you for the extra space (the differential space, like with tarsnap) instead of providing them for free (from what I can see the limits in the web UI are like 1000 daily and weekly snapshots, 200 monthy snapshots, 100 quarterly snapshows, and 10 yearly snapshots, which I suspect are arbitrary 'good enough for most' numbers, not some hard limit based on what they can pro…
I just now need a deduplicating asymmetrically encrypted backup program.
I've tried duplicity in the past, and maybe I should try it again. But my recollection is that duplicity will just fail to do backups at the slightest hint of any problem. Like maybe if the last backup was interrupted then no more backups for you until you attend to it.
Edit: More memories returning of having to dig out my decryption key to resync the metadata when duplicity gets unhappy, and then since my target server was append-only, duplicity was upset when it wasn't allowed overwrite any of it's incomplete metadata files. I guess the ZFS snapshot technique would alleviate the latter issue.
To be fair, if tarsnap gets confused it needs the keys to do its fsck command, but I recall this sort of thing happening regularly with duplicity and almost never with tarsnap.
Aren't these storage prices absurd? Please let me know if I'm misunderstanding.
It's insane. Not sure how anyone can accept such a rip off pricing. Tarsnap : $0.25 / GB storage, $0.25 / GB bandwidth cost rsync.net : $0.015 / GB storage, no bandwidth cost s3 : $0.023 / GB storage, some complicated bandwidth pricing If tarsnap is built on top of s3, they're charging 10 times for the storage cost. Easy money from the uninformed?
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How's the saying in every HN thread go? "Don't set your prices based on your costs, set your prices based on the value you deliver." or something like that. Tarsnap is a wonderful piece of software. You're paying for that. That said, is the value of "Tarsnap" worth the price difference from "Borg+rsync.net"? (Or Restic, I've been meaning to look into Restic). I'm not so sure. These days I'm a customer of rsync.net, n…
rsync.net is also overpriced for strictly backup purposes. Make sure you do check out restic; it can use S3 or Backblaze B2 (I actually use both) as backends instead of something expensive like rsync.net. The value of these boutique storage services evaporates when you start using restic.
There are services like rsync.net that support borg at a lower price. Borgbase is one of them. I haven’t used either of these.
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and now also go google what SLI means ;-)
Very roughly: SLI - Service Level Indicators - Metrics ie Latency of each request / response cycle SLO - Service Level Objective - What threshold we are aiming for - 10 ms from request to response averaged over 1 hour period. SLA - SL agreement - contract with custom yet what happens if we breach (credits given, put the CTO in stocks and throw eggs at him etc)
Instead we get refunded some pitiful amount when our business is seriously disrupted for an extended period of time.
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Very roughly: SLI - Service Level Indicators - Metrics ie Latency of each request / response cycle SLO - Service Level Objective - What threshold we are aiming for - 10 ms from request to response averaged over 1 hour period. SLA - SL agreement - contract with custom yet what happens if we breach (credits given, put the CTO in stocks and throw eggs at him etc)
I know it's a joke, but I think if an SLA involved putting a CTO in stocks and throwing eggs at him then that'd encourage me to sign up for the service. Especially if the video of it were posted after every incident. Instead we get refunded some pitiful amount when our business is seriously disrupted for an extended period of time.
My youngest once found some sort of chocolate drops called "unicorn poo" - which seems a more ironic thing to chuck at CTOs !
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That sort of logic doesn't really apply here because: * RDS costs obviously scale linearly with ongoing time and probably scale linearly with the total amount of data being backed up. So depending on the revenue of the business, these extra costs could easily end up outweighing the (notional) cost of the time saved, which is mostly a one-off expense. * The cost of a software engineer's time is notional in the context…
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> I realized that this was introduced by some code I wrote in 2014: Occasionally Tarsnap users need to move a machine between accounts,
with an implicit "and I fixed that code now" or "and I will fix that tomorrow when I get enough sleep". Let's hope he writes later a follow up explaining the details.
> [a] postmortem on the front page of HN
Is that bad? I upvoted this almost instantly, then went to the comment section to upvote cperciva if he was here, then I read the full post and verified my first upvote was correct.
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Fancy would be writing an application to talk to RDS, creating an RDS instance, creating a database, creating whatever IAM link is needed for auth into the db so you don't need a second set of credentials, creating a schema, creating columns with different data types, and then modifying the application to handle edge cases for the different data types, logic to insert, update, delete rows, select items, yadda yadda y…
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He could have set up a more complex architecture and paid much more in hosting costs over the years to overengineer the solution. What would the benefits be? It might have avoided this one outage or saved a few hours restoring the data. The drawbacks? Much more time developing and maintaining the solution and higher subscription costs for users.
The solutions you are familiar with and comfortable with are perfectly valid. But you are falling into the trap of thinking "what I'm familiar with and comfortable with is the only valid answer and everyone else is wrong and stupid".
(caveat: I may be running on old tarsnap company info but) I must say, the ONLY thing that has ever made me shy away from seriously using tarsnap was the prospect of an unexpected Colin Percival outage. i.e. key person risk. I'm guessing I'm not alone in this.