3 ms·

Yep we're going to get at least a few actual technical blog posts online in the coming month. We haven't got around to writing them yet tho so feel free to surf

Yep we're going to get at least a few actual technical blog posts online in the coming month. We haven't got around to writing them yet tho so feel free to surface any requests :) Will most likely start with the following: 1. Overall architecture and internals. 2. Verification and projection mechanisms, how we keep data safe. 3. How we manage a large amount of hardware (hundreds of thousands of disks) with a small team, how we automatically deal with alerts etc. 4. A deep-dive into the Diskotech architecture and how we changed our storage layer to support SMR disks. Hopefully these will be of a sufficient level of detail. We certainly won't be getting into any details on cost but we're pretty open from a technical perspective. (Lemme just take a moment to say how great Backblaze's tech blog posts are btw.)

atYevP 11y ago
Yev here -> Let me just say you're welcome and thanks for joining the party :D
wpietri 11y ago
I would be especially interested to hear how a focus on actual customer experience was maintained during all of this deep technology work. One of the ways tech companies wrong is by putting the tech first and the users second. I think Dropbox's early competitive advantage was putting the user experience first. Everybody else had weird, complex systems; you folks just had a magic folder that was always correct. User focus like that is easier to pull off when it's just a few people. But once you break the customer problem up into enough pieces that hundreds of engineers can get involved, sometimes the tail starts wagging the dog and technically-oriented decisions start harming the user experience. How did you folks avoid that?
atYevP 11y ago
> Yep we're going to get at least a few actual technical blog posts online in the coming month. We haven't got around to writing them yet tho so feel free to surface any requests :) Here's a request, how did you migrate all that data. Are you going to be open-sourcing any of the tools that you built up? We'd be interesting in hearing about that process. A lot of folks using B2 right now are trying to do this exact thing (or making copies if not actual migrations). Cheers! ;-)

atYevP 11y ago

Yev here -> Let me just say you're welcome and thanks for joining the party :D

wpietri 11y ago

I would be especially interested to hear how a focus on actual customer experience was maintained during all of this deep technology work. One of the ways tech companies wrong is by putting the tech first and the users second. I think Dropbox's early competitive advantage was putting the user experience first. Everybody else had weird, complex systems; you folks just had a magic folder that was always correct. User focus like that is easier to pull off when it's just a few people. But once you break the customer problem up into enough pieces that hundreds of engineers can get involved, sometimes the tail starts wagging the dog and technically-oriented decisions start harming the user experience. How did you folks avoid that?

atYevP 11y ago

> Yep we're going to get at least a few actual technical blog posts online in the coming month. We haven't got around to writing them yet tho so feel free to surface any requests :) Here's a request, how did you migrate all that data. Are you going to be open-sourcing any of the tools that you built up? We'd be interesting in hearing about that process. A lot of folks using B2 right now are trying to do this exact thing (or making copies if not actual migrations). Cheers! ;-)