4 ms·

I've been suspicious of network-attached block storage ever since the Amazon EBS cascading failure of April 2011 and these three blog posts that Joyent did in r

I've been suspicious of network-attached block storage ever since the Amazon EBS cascading failure of April 2011 and these three blog posts that Joyent did in response: https://www.joyent.com/blog/on-cascading-failures-and-amazons-elastic-block-store https://www.joyent.com/blog/on-cascading-failures-and-amazon... https://www.joyent.com/blog/magical-block-store-when-abstractions-fail-us/ https://www.joyent.com/blog/magical-block-store-when-abstrac... https://www.joyent.com/blog/network-storage-in-the-cloud-delicious-but-deadly https://www.joyent.com/blog/network-storage-in-the-cloud-del... Besides Joyent, I think DigitalOcean and Vultr do it right, with RAID-backed local storage and a backup option.

kentonv 11y ago
I'm having trouble unpacking useful information out of these rambly blog posts. It sounds like the basic complaint is that abstractions add complexity, which is more trouble when it goes wrong. I agree that if you have a large-scale sophisticated operation you will probably want to choose local disks and handle availability your own way (and GCE provides those options). But for small-scale operations that can't justify as much engineering, abstractions like persistent disks and automatic migration will save a ton of time and avoid data loss. Ironically, Digital Ocean seems to target this smaller scale, yet they've set the wrong defaults for their target market.