31–40 of 169 posts
> What’s interesting here, when you look at the highest-level block diagram of S3’s technical design, is the fact that AWS tends to ship its org chart. This is a phrase that’s often used in a pretty disparaging way, but in this case it’s absolutely fascinating. I’d go even further: at this scale, it is essential and required to develop these kind of projects with any sort of velocity. Large organizations ship their c…
> What’s interesting here, when you look at the highest-level block diagram of S3’s technical design, is the fact that AWS tends to ship its org chart. This is a phrase that’s often used in a pretty disparaging way, but in this case it’s absolutely fascinating. I’d go even further: at this scale, it is essential and required to develop these kind of projects with any sort of velocity. Large organizations ship their c…
Working in genomics, I've dealt with lots of petabyte data stores over the past decade. Having used AWS S3, GCP GCS, and a raft of storage systems for collocated hardware (Ceph, Gluster, and an HP system whose name I have blocked from my memory), I have no small amount of appreciation for the effort that goes into operating these sorts of systems. And the benefits of sharing disk IOPs with untold numbers of other cus…
Great to see Amazon employees being allowed to talk openly about how S3 works behind the scenes. I would love to hear more about how Glacier works. As far as I know, they have never revealed what the underlying storage medium is, leading to a lot of wild speculation (tape? offline HDDs? custom HDDs?).
Some people disagree though. It’s still an unknown.
> That’s a bit error rate of 1 in 10^15 requests. In the real world, we see that blade of grass get missed pretty frequently – and it’s actually something we need to account for in S3. One of the things I remember from my time at AWS was conversations about how 1 in a billion events end up being a daily occurrence when you're operating at S3 scale. Things that you'd normally mark off as so wildly improbable it's not…
Ever see a UUID collision?
And that's if you're going completely random and not taking care to try to reduce collisions.
> That’s a bit error rate of 1 in 10^15 requests. In the real world, we see that blade of grass get missed pretty frequently – and it’s actually something we need to account for in S3. One of the things I remember from my time at AWS was conversations about how 1 in a billion events end up being a daily occurrence when you're operating at S3 scale. Things that you'd normally mark off as so wildly improbable it's not…
Great to see Amazon employees being allowed to talk openly about how S3 works behind the scenes. I would love to hear more about how Glacier works. As far as I know, they have never revealed what the underlying storage medium is, leading to a lot of wild speculation (tape? offline HDDs? custom HDDs?).
Glacier is a big "keep your lips sealed" one. I'd love AWS to talk about everything there, and the entire journey it was on because it is truly fascinating.
The original Glacier was very clearly tape, but given the instant retrieval capabilities the newer S3-Glacier tiers are most likely just low-margin HDDs, maybe with some dynamic powering on and off of drives/servers.
Great to see Amazon employees being allowed to talk openly about how S3 works behind the scenes. I would love to hear more about how Glacier works. As far as I know, they have never revealed what the underlying storage medium is, leading to a lot of wild speculation (tape? offline HDDs? custom HDDs?).
The things we could build if S3 specified a simple OAuth2-based protocol for delegating read/write access. The world needs an HTTP-based protocol for apps to access data on the user's behalf. Google Drive is the closest to this but it only has a single provider and other issues[0]. I'm sad remoteStorage never caught on. I really hope Solid does well but it feels too complex to me. My own take on the problem is https:…
It really is such a shame that all the projects that tried/are trying to create data sovereignty for users became weird crypto.
Working in genomics, I've dealt with lots of petabyte data stores over the past decade. Having used AWS S3, GCP GCS, and a raft of storage systems for collocated hardware (Ceph, Gluster, and an HP system whose name I have blocked from my memory), I have no small amount of appreciation for the effort that goes into operating these sorts of systems. And the benefits of sharing disk IOPs with untold numbers of other cus…