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Tarsnap outage postmortem

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Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#91

Post by i_have_an_idea »

patrec wrote: post #80
LukeShu wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Completely ignoring costs, can you name a single use case for which tarsnap would be better than Borg or restic on rsync.net?

As a consultant on a DR project, you can increase your billables by 10x due to the extremely slow backup restore speeds.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#92

Post by prmoustache »

Aeolun wrote: post #56
TheDong wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Colin's fault that you're using a browser that can't render an html rendition of an email which has been widely in use since before iOS existed. This is entirely Safari's fault for not having good compatibility with a common existing webpage format. Anyway, if you're the intended audience (someone using tarsnap), you also received a copy to your email address, where you can read the text with your email read…

The HTML rendition in this case did it’s best to be hard to read. It’s not impossible, and likely just a fault of whatever list thing is used, but it could be better, and it’s nice if people let you know as such right?

How can simple black on white text with a lisible font be hard to read?

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#94

Post by justsomehnguy »

aborsy wrote: post #79
mattbee wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The deduping in restic is just on the edge of acceptable for me, making me think I'd have trouble with a lot more data. Basically the one a month "prune" operation takes about 36h (to B2) . I feel I could be tuning something but also it works and I don't want to touch it.

I backup around 2TB with Restic, also tried locally with Borg. The size is nearly the same. Sadly, I can’t even test with Tarsnap! (absurd pricing for 2TB).

> absurd pricing for 2TB

Well, it can't be that ba..

    $0.25 x 2000 = $500
Yikes. And this is without BW costs.

At $500/M you can just rent a dedicated physical server with a lot of HDDs and still have money left for your favourite pumpkin latte.

For comparison rsync.net says it's $0.015 per GB/Mo, for 2TBs that's $30/m and no BW costs.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#95

Post by zetalyrae »

>The process of recovering the EC2 instance state consists of two steps: First, reading all of the metadata headers from S3; and second, "replaying" all of those operations locally. (These cannot be performed at the same time, since the use of log-structured storage means that log entries are "rewritten" to free up storage when data is deleted; log entries contain sequence numbers to allow them to be replayed in the correct order, but they must be sorted into the correct order after being retrieved before they can be replayed.)

Far be it from me to tell anyone how to write software, but why build a database on top of S3 when you can just chuck the metadata into RDS with however much replication you want?

The backups themselves should be in S3, but using S3 as a NoSQL append-only database seems unwise.

This would benefit from being further from the metal.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#96

Post by thenickdude »

mekster wrote: post #29
RockRobotRock wrote: post #13

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?

S3: Upload bandwidth is free, download is what I'd consider to be astronomical at $0.09/GB ($90/TB).

Geez, that's really not improving the comparison with Tarsnap.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#97

Post by zetalyrae »

mst wrote: post #86
RockRobotRock wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you not be snide and please help me understand? It seems 50 times more expensive than B2. I'm genuinely curious about the product.

Roughly: The number of hours of my time that would be required to get something with even theoretically equivalent features would be sufficient to make the cost - and opportunity cost - involved seem far more reasonable. Plus "written by cperciva and heavily battle tested by Serious Sysadmins" is a feature I couldn't recreate myself - notice that while there was an outage, part of the reason for it taking a while was…

You don't need to build it yourself. You can use restic or rclone with S3/B2 and both support encryption.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#98

Post by lifeisstillgood »

toong wrote: post #90
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

huh, never heard of SLO before.

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)

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#99

Post by k8sToGo »

stigz wrote: post #9
cperciva wrote: post #3

blinks Ok, I really wasn't expecting this to land at the top of HN. I'd love to stick around to answer any questions people have, but it's 10PM and my toddler decided to go to bed at 5PM... so if I'm lucky I can get about 4 hours of sleep before she decides that it's time to get up. I'll check in and answer questions in the morning.

Why would I use your service over restic? God bless you Colin, but reading this, it appears you're the only one in charge of the infrastructure for this service. I'm glad you're clear about no SLA, but this seems like a big liability between me and my backups.

If the data is super important you should be setting on two different providers anyways for backups.

Re: Tarsnap outage postmortem

#100

Post by KronisLV »

TheDong wrote: post #71
switch007 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A is the correct kind of HTML use for the body of plain text email ? It looks like paragraphs of text to me. is far more appropriate That isn’t apple’s problem, nor mine.

pre is the only correct element to use since in many emails, the exact formatting and linebreaks and such are important. For example, a code review on a mailing list can only make sense with the linebreaks and spacing preserved. However, as you knew to try, there is "reader mode", which is meant to heuristically ignore the exact html in order to display textual content. Firefox's reader mode has no trouble figuring o…

> Firefox's reader mode has no trouble figuring out that this is a block of text that can be reflowed.

It was absolutely unreadable on mobile Firefox (Android), initially didn't even think to use the reader mode, which indeed did help make it readable!

I think this is the first time I've ever actually needed that functionality, never quite got it beforehand. Thanks for the suggestion!

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