Well, I've been doing the infrastructure thing for a living for a while and it's always half amusing, half worrying to see comments like this. So, no, I certai

Well, I've been doing the infrastructure thing for a living for a while and it's always half amusing, half worrying to see comments like this. So, no, I certainly did not forget about disk failure. Indeed it's one of the reasons that I'd rather not host certain things as EC2 instances. I was mentioning disk failure as part of ongoing maintenance, which is a different thing to a once-in-a-year blackout that you (as the reseller of the service) don't have to debug and recover or actively protect against. As far as scalability: Well, how far would 67TB carry you? See, that's where the amusement starts. A service like heroku it would probably carry not very far. Their service is not about storage. The backblaze gives you 45 spindles for cheap. 45 spindles translate to roughly 4500 IOPS. That's a significant rate. It's also a rate that a few database intensive customers can exceed with ease. Now you're suddenly in an entirely different game called "Storage Engineering". It's about things like balancing IO hotspots, redundant data paths and many other pesky little details that were not exactly your core business in first place. You sure can scale out with backblaze, but it's rather unlikely that you can do it for cheaper than what amazon has on offer (economies of scale, y'know) because scaling IOPS is quite a bit harder than scaling capacity. Here's a quiz for you: Why do you think none of the cloud providers other than amazon has an offer anywhere near the flexibility/price of EBS?