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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

#301

Post by weinzierl »

huntaub wrote: post #111
weinzierl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is nice and useful of course but there is ton of things that can't reliably be done with that (like running any database you that comes to mind) which makes it important to be precise here.

Is there something specific that you worry about when running a database on a networked file system? I would imagine that any database which is correctly fsync'ing the data to the write-ahead-log should work just fine.

First of all databases don't support running on NFS. It is an unsupported configuration.

The deeper reason for that is, that the consistency guarantees from NFS (close-to-open consistency) are a lot weaker than what you get from POSIX.

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

#302

Post by nine_k »

kingnothing wrote: post #270
wongarsu wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you going to risk your entire business over "probably never get a hardware failure" that, if it hits, might result in days of downtime to resolve? I wouldn't.

Just pay 2x for the hardware and have a hot standby, 1990s-style. Practice switching between the boxes every month or so; should be imperceptible for the customers and a nearly non-event for the ops.

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

#303

Post by nthh »

swyx wrote: post #248
wongarsu wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

sounds like an opportunity for someone (you?) to offer an abstraction slightly above bare metal to do the stuff you said to do, charging higher than bare metal but lower than the other stuff. how much daylight is there between those prices?

I'm sure there are companies in this space providing private clouds on bare metal, I wonder how that would be to operate at scale though.

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

#304

Post by nthh »

_bare_metal wrote: post #84
mritchie712 wrote: post #65

Pretty sure we're in your target market. We [0] currently use GCP Filestore to host DuckDB. Here's the pricing and performance at 10 TiB. Can you give me an idea on the pricing and performance for Regatta? Service Tier: Zonal Location: us-central1 10 TiB instance at $0.35/TiB/hr Monthly cost: $2,560.00 Performance Estimate: Read IOPS: 92,000 Write IOPS: 26,000 Read Throughput: 2,600 MiB/s Write Throughput: 880 MiB/s…

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..

This is compelling but it would be useful to compare upfront costs here. Investing $20,000+ in a server isn't feasible for many. I'd also be curious to know how much a failsafe (perhaps "heatable" cold storage, at least for the example) would cost.

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

#305

Post by huntaub »

aloukissas wrote: post #297

This is fantastic! Interestingly, I was one of the early engineers at Maginatics [1], a company that built exactly this in 2011 - and Netflix was one of our earliest beta customers. We strived to be both SMB3 and POSIX compatible, but leaning into SMB3 semantics. We had some pretty great optimizations that gave almost local disk performance (e.g. using file and directory leases [2], async metadata ops, data and metad…

Awesome! Great to meet you, so happy that so many folks in the space are here.

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

#306

Post by objectivefs »

Congratulations on your launch from ObjectiveFS! There is a lot of interest in 1-to-1 filesystems for mixed workloads, hope you can capture a nice share of that.

Using NFS and being able to use an existing bucket is a nice way to make it easy to get started and try things out. For applications that need full consistency between the S3 and the filesystem view, you can even provide an S3 proxy endpoint on your durable cache that removes any synchronization delays.

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

#307

Post by huntaub »

objectivefs wrote: post #306

Congratulations on your launch from ObjectiveFS! There is a lot of interest in 1-to-1 filesystems for mixed workloads, hope you can capture a nice share of that. Using NFS and being able to use an existing bucket is a nice way to make it easy to get started and try things out. For applications that need full consistency between the S3 and the filesystem view, you can even provide an S3 proxy endpoint on your durable…

Thank you so much! It’s been amazing to see what you all have built over the years, and it’s (of course) been inspirational for me.

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

#308

Post by huntaub »

craigkilgo wrote: post #295

How did you choose the name Regatta?

I spent several years working in the Northeast, and I developed an appreciation (but not a skill) for sailing. In some sense, I think of Regatta as high-speed sailing on top of customer data lakes.

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

#309

Post by huntaub »

geertj wrote: post #298
mdaniel wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard you about the "limited hands, infinite wishlist" but nowadays when I see someone making bold claims about transactions and consistency over the network, I grab my popcorn bucket and eagerly await the Jepsen report about it The good news is that you, personally, don't have to spend the time to create the Jepsen test harness, you can pay them to run the test but I have no idea what kind of O($) we're talking he…

> I grab my popcorn bucket and eagerly await the Jepsen report about it I am the same, as distributed consensus is notoriously hard especially when it fronts distributed storage. However, it is not imposssible.. Hunter and I were both in the EFS team at AWS (I am still there), and he was deeply involved in all aspects of our consensus and replication layers. So if anyone can do it, Hunter is!

Thank you for the kind words, Geert!

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

#310

Post by huntaub »

SteveNuts wrote: post #296

Any plans to support on-prem object stores and not just S3?

It’s not as clear, but it’s certainly something we are considering. If you’d like to use us on-prem, I’d love to hear more. Can you shoot me an email with details at hleath [at] regattastorage.com?
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