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Object Storage: AWS vs Google Cloud Storage vs Azure Storage vs DigitalOcean

149 points by Elect2 9y ago

Brajeshwar 9y ago
Can we include Wasabi[1] in the comparison? They seem to have a really compelling offering when it comes to Object Storage and their pricing. 1. https://wasabi.com/ https://wasabi.com/
- thebigjc 9y ago
  Their pricing looks great. Has anyone used them?
  - askaboutit 9y ago
    Pricing has recently changed to remove egress costs completely. The speeds were ok. Nothing special. But this is most likely better used for long term data storage? With a CDN it would suit well as a large media store for video/image delivery.
blowski 9y ago
How does Digital Ocean compare in terms of reliability and compatibility with existing tools? I haven't used it, so genuine question.
- overcast 9y ago
  From their documentation. Spaces provides a RESTful XML API for programatically managing the data you store through the use of standard HTTP requests. The API is interoperable with Amazon's AWS S3 API allowing you to interact with the service while using the tools you already know.
truetraveller 9y ago
I was really excited about DO spaces. I compared every major Object Storage (OVH,B2,Wasabi,S3,Azure). DO spaces came out much ahead. I did dozens of hours of research. I was a customer (and I still am). But I am less excited now. Basically, there are loads of issues with rejected requests because of rate limiting (returns a lot of 503 "slow down" responses). Basically, I don't recall ever receiving this from S3. You can check the forums to see more in-depth discussion. The good part: This is a solvable problem, and I hope they relax these limits very soon. Another great anecdote: their API is 99% compatible with S3. In fact, the official recommendation is to use the AWS SDKs on the server, which I am doing!
- aclelland 9y ago
  S3 will sometimes return a "503 temporary error" response if you start writing lots of files per second. From my understanding, if they see that your bucket has a constant high write rate they'll make some configuration changes in the background to accommodate the higher write rate. That being said, last month I wrote over 60 million files to S3 and the number of failed writes were tiny (solved by simply retrying the write) I've not used DOs spaces yet, I'd love to know if they guarantee read after write consistency. I know S3 has some issues with that depending on use case. Maybe it's time for another look at spaces.
  - truetraveller 9y ago
    Yes, DO spaces is very strict about both GET and PUT. I did a benchmark requests-per-second (literally just fetching a URL a bench of times). I get about ~180 requests per second, after which all requests failed. Amazon S3 is much better in the sense that there IS dynamic scaling if it notices spikes. To the defense of DO, they are newer and their business model is "cheap,cheap,cheap", so they can't compete at the same level.
  - _hyn3 9y ago
    S3 will automatically shard your bucket evenly across your sub-namespace if you use pre-shardable names whenever possible. This sounds complex but is actually fairly easy to do. For example, if you are not dealing with randomly generated ID's, try using Base64 encoded keynames rather than the keynames themselves. (A more limited character set is helpful, though.) A better name than user_f38c9123 is f38c9123_user, which will allow a statistically even shard size across the full 16 character range of the first character. As more performance is needed, S3 will automatically shard the second character into 16x16 (256) possible shards, etc. Also, using a more limited character set such as hexadecimal (that is, [[a-f][0-8]]*) (or just numberic digits) for the first characters of a filename will shard more evenly than a full alphanumeric [A-z][0-9][etc]. Jeff Barr had a blog post on this a while ago.. here it is: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-performance-tips-tricks-seattle-hiring-event/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-performance-tips-... "By the way: two or three prefix characters in your hash are really all you need: here’s why. If we target conservative targets of 100 operations per second and 20 million stored objects per partition, a four character hex hash partition set in a bucket or sub-bucket namespace could theoretically grow to support millions of operations per second and over a trillion unique keys before we’d need a fifth character in the hash." We actually do exactly this in Userify (blatant plug, SSH key management, sudo, etc https://userify.com https://userify.com) by just switching the ID type to the end of the string: company_[shortuuid] becomes [shortuuid]_company. It makes full bucket scans for a single keyname a bit easier and faster if you use different buckets for each type of data, but you actually will get better sharding overall by mixing all of your data types together in a single bucket. The trade-off is worth it for the general case.
cyberferret 9y ago
(*) for a particular use case. The example is 200GB storage with 2000GB data transfer (out) every month. That's a LOT of data going out every month, so I am guessing the scenario is if you are hosting a photo library and lots of people are downloading every month. If however you are just using the service as an online storage to hold <100GB of data as backup (i.e. mainly only transfer in), then S3 turns out way cheaper than DO. Not knocking either service - I actually use both, for different use cases.
- Blackstone4 9y ago
  When you say way cheaper what do you mean? Like savings of ~$5-10 on a spend of $10-20? Or is it material? Like $50
  - cyberferret 9y ago
    Well, DO is a minimum of $5 per month (up to 250GB IIRC). 100GB on S3 with just uploads during the month will run under $2.
    - some_account 9y ago
      I think it would be good if people didn't always pick these services based on price, since that's how you end up with one monopoly service and no alternatives. Support alternatives even if they are a bit more expensive.
      - Blackstone4 9y ago
        Agreed. The price difference in a lower usage case is not meaningful. I would choose based on ease of use, reliability and functionality. The main thing stopping me from using Digital Ocean is AWS RDS which is amazing. If they could bring out a similar solution with backups and MySQL and PostgreSQL, that would be amazing. :) I could then run my apps in docker.
      - cyberferret 9y ago
        Well, I actually agree with you. In my first post above my reply, I did say that I actually use both services based on my use cases. Both excellent, and work well (Oh, and I also use the Minio open source solution for one particular project too). Horses for courses.
Lunatic666 9y ago
Is there any open source S3 compatible software? I know Riak Cloud Storage (http://docs.basho.com/riak/cs/2.1.1/ http://docs.basho.com/riak/cs/2.1.1/), but I think it’s not maintained anymore.
- cyberferret 9y ago
  I believe minio.io provides open source S3 compatible storage on your own servers.
  - unixhero 9y ago
    True
- unixhero 9y ago
  The rclone project supports S3 https://rclone.org/s3/ https://rclone.org/s3/
- tobias3 9y ago
  OpenStack Swift or Ceph with Ceph Object Gateway. Don't use minio, it's a toy for testing.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    I've never used it in production; in what ways is minio lacking compared to Swift and Ceph?
    - tobias3 9y ago
      S3 is an abstraction that gives you a limited amount of operations with limited guarantees (e.g. eventual consistency, can only replace whole files). What you get in return is easier scalability and performance. If you use an S3 API to store files (like minio does) you give up power and gain nothing. So you are better off using NFS, samba, webdav, ftp, etc. Additionally minio doesn't seem to sync files to the file system, so you can't be sure a file is actually stored after a PUT operation (AWS S3 and swift have eventual consistency and Ceph has stronger guarantees).
stagbeetle 9y ago
The main cost seems to be bandwidth (speeds). If you've ever tried Spaces, you know it's a real slog uploading and downloading (even with good client-side speeds). DropBox has similar specs to Spaces, and does it for only $10. OneDrive has the same thing with $7 for 1TB. And there's another Chinese company, Tencent, that gives you 10TB for free (except it's slow and it's all in Chinese). The problem I have with this article (very brief table), is that the author is comparing two "enterprise" solutions to a consumer solution. With "enterprise" solutions, you get guaranteed uptime and speeds. With Spaces, and the rest I've mentioned, you don't get any of that. Only that your data will still be there as long as you pay out.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Spaces may be slow (never tried it), but it's still a different offering that Dropbox/OneDrive, which are not designed for massive public access. For example, Dropbox has a traffic limit of 200GB/day, which can't be increased.
lyager 9y ago
.. but with a monthly fee, which kind of breaks the idea of “pay as you go”, atleast for my purpose
- k__ 9y ago
  Haha, yes. But I have to admit, the $5 fees some of these new offerings have is probably to filter out some type of customers.
alexbilbie 9y ago
What is the durability objects stored with DO? S3 offers 11x9s of durability. Likewise what is the replication story? Can you get event notifications when objects are uploaded/deleted? Is there versioning? Static website hosting? Lifecycle management?
- icebraining 9y ago
  S3 offers 11x9s of durability. So they say, but the SLA doesn't make any promises about durability. https://aws.amazon.com/s3/sla/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/sla/
  - alexbilbie 9y ago
    The SLA governs availability. Details of durability here https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/DataDurability.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/DataDurabili...
- ngrilly 9y ago
  I asked DO about this, and their answer was that 1) data are replicated on-site (in the same data center) but are not replicated to another data center; and 2) as for now Spaces does not provide lifecycle management. As a side note, I think lifecycle management is very useful for backups. A server push its backups to the object storage, but cannot overwrite or delete previous backups. This is useful if the server is hacked...
beegeezuz 9y ago
People who compare DO and AWS don't have a clue about how real world works.
martinald 9y ago
The bandwidth egress charges on AWS (and GCP/Azure) are way too high. It almost seems cartel like. Bandwidth costs have dropped by a huge factor over the past few years; but none of this has been passed on. I really hope backblaze and/or DO manage to cause the big three some hurt on this and get them to reduce prices significantly; 7c/GB is really high these days.
- sitepodmatt 9y ago
  What are bandwidth costs? This comes up again and again, people see HE.net / Cogent / Level3 / Hibernia / NTT whatever offering 10gig handoff IP transit at a colo neutral location for X per month and somehow determine the true cost. When I suspect the reality is that much of cost is invested in routing equipment both internally and externally, evolving SDN and all the goodness it affords, being able to offer SLA per instance in terms of mbit that can be pushed, being able to mitigate DDOS, hiring top network engineers and researchers, being fully redundant across multiple providers and protected circuits rather than just a lonely hand off - or in GCP case building out the network themselves with multiple SLA tiers, being able to mitagate network issues quicker than a PagerDuty alert at a banwidth blender. Granted I'd say there still probably cushioning in there but judging network costs by comparing to a 10gig handoff at a random colo neutral, or blender, or OVH/Hetznet commodity servers, or Linode/Vultr/DO seems unfair in my opinion.
  - martinald 9y ago
    I totally understand that but the price hasn't dropped in what, a decade? My home internet connection (which includes a shedload of last mile costs laying fibre to my apartment) has went from 2mbit/sec to 1gig/sec (for less money in real terms) in a similar timespan. I'm not expecting it to be at the cost of a 10gig cogent connection at LINX, but some drop makes sense. DO/Backblaze pricing seems to be more on the money. Keep in mind these provides also do charge on top for a lot of other networking services (VPCs, NATs etc) which often can really add up, so I'd expect some of the SDN capex to be absorbed by that.
  - mrep 9y ago
    I met a network engineer for amazon about a year ago and I brought up the prices since I had heard about them being expensive here on hacker news. He laughed about it and said it was one of their most profitable departments with like a 90% margin.
turblety 9y ago
Sia [1] could be even cheaper, coming out at $1.10 for a TB [2]. Although this price might not be forever, and I'm still not sure about the reliability. In theory it should be more reliable, as it's decentralised and your data gets split among multiple servers around the world. The question remains what if the Sia network itself stops being profitable and people all exit at the same time. Although the same could be said for Amazon? Sia will actually soon be adding a backend to Minio too [3]. The only thing that has stopped me using Sia is you have to have the blockchain running on the machine. 1. https://sia.tech https://sia.tech 2. https://siastats.info/storage_pricing https://siastats.info/storage_pricing 3. https://blog.sia.tech/introducing-s3-style-file-sharing-for-sia-through-the-new-minio-integration-bb880af2366a https://blog.sia.tech/introducing-s3-style-file-sharing-for-...
- cyberferret 9y ago
  Curious as to why you edited your post to remove mention of the other service that you had listed originally?
  - turblety 9y ago
    Sorry @cyberferret. I previously listed Storj [1] but did a bit of research and it didn't actually look cheaper when you consider bandwidth cost. $0.015 per GB per month $0.05 per GB downloaded [1] https://storj.io/ https://storj.io/
    - cyberferret 9y ago
      Cool thanks! I presumed that it didn't meet some sort of criteria that was being discussed here. I just wanted to make sure there were no issues with the service itself per se.
      - digianarchist 9y ago
        They're in closed BETA. I looked into them but they are not that good for long term storage. Plus their payment system is centralized.
SlowBro 9y ago
Maybe I'm missing something, but where is the Azure data?
- skc 9y ago
  Doesn't seem to be there. Was wondering the same.
- kryptkpr 9y ago
  Also missing the SoftLayer/IBM S3-compatible offering. We use it very lightly (our IoT firmware builds from CI are going up there) and pay nothing, their free limits are quite generous.
dsacco 9y ago
This is great, but I’m disappointed Backblaze B2 isn’t included. That seems like an oversight unless someone can point out how B2 doesn’t hold its own with these options in a glaring way. There are tradeoffs, but B2 seems to be very competitive overall. B2 is cheaper than every option here for both storage ($0.005/GB) and egress ($0.01/GB).[1] Their transaction pricing is also cheaper.[2] Despite being cheaper, it’s still hot storage, so you can immediately download buckets, in whole or in part. I’ve personally used it to backup (and restore) terabytes of data for over a year. I doubt it has an SLA like GCP or AWS, but DigitalOcean doesn’t either, yet it’s listed here. I find the B2 API documentation to be very readable as well.[3] I’ve used AWS S3, Glacier and GCP Nearline, Coldline. I can’t think of a specific thing that has disappointed me about B2, and the reliability has been excellent. The nature of my work is that I have very large datasets, and B2 becomes extremely competitive when you’re backing up tens of terabytes or more. _________________________________ 1. https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html 2. https://www.backblaze.com/b2/b2-transactions-price.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/b2-transactions-price.html 3. https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/ https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/
- truetraveller 9y ago
  I really wanted to like B2. I love the docs and super-clean interface. But B2 was just too "weird" when it came to uploading an object. You can't replace an object key, so you always get a new object key when uploading. This is unlike any normal object store, where you can just upload to an existing key. Also, if you upload an object with the same name (e.g. myphoto.png) it creates a new version, and there's no way to stop this. I don't want or need a new version! I have a feeling this restriction is in place because of the underlying "vault" implementation.
  - beepbeepbeep1 9y ago
    B2 is great as a backup store. I use it for backup. I wouldn't use it for non backup object storage, as it's in a single data center. S3 and Google Cloud are completely different, I'm not sure on the Google specifics but S3 has data replicated across three AZs.
hacknat 9y ago
I work for a company that has to provision hosted products for customers across all the clouds and the one that has been impressing me the most lately is Azure. The load balancers are also the gateways (sound network topology), so there is no need for elastic IPs, NAT Gateways, or proxy protocol. The other thing I like about Azure is they have storage classes that automatically cross region replicate. The automatic storage encryption is a bit of an issue, but I know they were working on it, last I checked. You can’t beat the offerings of AWS, but there are definitely some compliance scenarios that are easier to fulfill on Azure. We rarely get customer requests for Google Cloud. Seems like it’s mostly Azure and AWS (at least at the enterprise level).
- manigandham 9y ago
  You don't need any that for load balancing on any cloud. Google Cloud has the best load balancer with a global anycast address that will route to the nearest DC with instances and free capacity. For automatic cross-region replication for storage, are you talking about Azure's GRS class? That's the same as GCP's multiregional class and AWS allows you to setup entire bucket replication to anywhere else in a few clicks.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  You will find the load balancing at Google to be superior to AWS and Azure. Had not used the others.
- davidgl 9y ago
  https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/07/21/trends-cloud-computing-uses-aws-uses-azure/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/07/21/trends-cloud-computing...
willow_sp 9y ago
Shameless Plug :) I wrote recently a series of articles comparing most of those providers and explaining how to use them with JavaScript: - Amazon S3: https://medium.com/@javidgon/amazon-s3-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-it-with-javascript-701fffc89154 https://medium.com/@javidgon/amazon-s3-pros-cons-and-how-to-... - Google Cloud Storage: https://medium.com/@javidgon/google-cloud-storage-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-it-with-javascript-ea9ce60a94c0 https://medium.com/@javidgon/google-cloud-storage-pros-cons-... - Microsoft Azure Blob Storage: https://medium.com/@javidgon/microsoft-azure-blob-storage-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-it-with-javascript-ca5aaf5d5ffd https://medium.com/@javidgon/microsoft-azure-blob-storage-pr... - Backblaze B2: https://itnext.io/backblaze-b2-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-it-with-javascript-8c2d2a9a69d9 https://itnext.io/backblaze-b2-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-it-w... - DigitalOcean Spaces: https://medium.com/dailyjs/digital-ocean-spaces-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-it-with-javascript-1802559ce2bd https://medium.com/dailyjs/digital-ocean-spaces-pros-cons-an... - Wasabi Hot Storage: https://medium.com/@javidgon/wasabi-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-with-javascript-fa528c3779a2 https://medium.com/@javidgon/wasabi-pros-cons-and-how-to-use...
- jopsen 9y ago
  shameless request :) trying comparing performance: latency, bandwidth up/down and scalability in the face of many concurrent requests. And then do that wrt. compute resources in various locations.
squid3 9y ago
NodeChef's object storage is very attractive option especially with no data transfer charges. Available in two regions. https://nodechef.com/s3-compatible-object-storage https://nodechef.com/s3-compatible-object-storage
- manigandham 9y ago
  At $1/GB, it's the most expensive option mentioned on this page by far. Even with GCP's pricey storage, you would have to download your data 10x for this to make sense (or 88x with DO), and that's before considering cross-cloud/transit costs. Also since you're the cofounder of nodechef, you should add a disclaimer when mentioning your own product.
askaboutit 9y ago
Wasabi storage has unlimited egress now. So spaces with its rate limiting doesn’t seem that much of a big deal. Storage is something that won’t make much money in a few years I believe. I think the Egress overcharging maybe finally seeing decent competition. https://wasabi.com/pricing/ https://wasabi.com/pricing/
- corobo 9y ago
  "unlimited" - It looks like if you actually try to use unlimited you get limited, it's closer to a Dropbox competitor than an s3 competitor > If your use case creates an unreasonable burden on our infrastructure, we reserve the right to limit your egress traffic and/or ask you to switch to our Legacy pricing plan. > Wasabi’s hot cloud storage service is not designed to be used to serve up (for example) web pages at a rate where the downloaded data far exceeds the stored data or any other use case where a small amount of data is served up a large amount of times
  - askaboutit 9y ago
    Oh, well that puts a kink in that. They had an example of 1PB costing $90,000 to download from S3. On their old plan it would be $40,000 (quick math). I think if the company was that large S3, comes across as a much better offering.
milesward 9y ago
Cool site, but noticing an error: This compares AWS S3 single region pricing ($0.024/gb) to GCP GCS multi-region pricing ($0.026/gb) rather than GCP GCS single region pricing ($0.020/gb). Hopefully the creator/author will correct the discrepancy... Disclosure: I'm a pricing dweeb at Google Cloud
- arghwhat 9y ago
  I sincerely hope your business card says "Pricing Dweep, Google Cloud Products". If not, you need to get this fixed.
  - milesward 9y ago
    New Card Order: Submitted.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  Thanks for pointing out and noticed the same.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
buryat 9y ago
Would be nice to add things like: - Consistency - First byte latency - Limits on requests - Max upload size - Extra features
- robbyt 9y ago
  Yes, for example GCP does not have S3's "eventual consistent" behavior. When data is written to GCP, it's available to read immediately.
zbjornson 9y ago
This uses the pricing for multi-regional GCS, which is geo-redundant across two or more locations separated by at least 100 miles. Regional GCS is the storage class equivalent to standard S3 and is $0.02/GB.
- milesward 9y ago
  Yup, I saw the same thing.
- Elect2 9y ago
  Corrected.
  - milesward 9y ago
    Woo, thx!
manigandham 9y ago
This is a rather simplistic comparison. These object storage services have several tiers and features that you need to take into account like zone vs regional replication, strong-consistency listings, bandwidth and access depending on where your compute is, integrations like notifications and functions, etc. That being said, the clouds are great if your compute is co-located in the same place because the transfer fees are waived. Otherwise DO or B2 are probably better options for less usage or more neutral network locations and egress.
johnnycarcin 9y ago
Azure storage is available in way more than 10 regions FYI: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/services/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/serv...
driverdan 9y ago
You can negotiate lower S3 prices if you're a heavy user. I assume the other companies will as well. By heavy I mean exceeding the lowest price tiers significantly.
erikpukinskis 9y ago
One of the neat features of Microsoft’s storage service is that you can append to existing files. It surprised me that this isn’t standard on other services. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/understanding-block-blobs--append-blobs--and-page-blobs https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/un...

149 points by Elect2 9y ago

Can we include Wasabi[1] in the comparison? They seem to have a really compelling offering when it comes to Object Storage and their pricing. 1. https://wasabi.com/ https://wasabi.com/

thebigjc 9y ago
Their pricing looks great. Has anyone used them?
- askaboutit 9y ago
  Pricing has recently changed to remove egress costs completely. The speeds were ok. Nothing special. But this is most likely better used for long term data storage? With a CDN it would suit well as a large media store for video/image delivery.

blowski 9y ago

How does Digital Ocean compare in terms of reliability and compatibility with existing tools? I haven't used it, so genuine question.

overcast 9y ago
From their documentation. Spaces provides a RESTful XML API for programatically managing the data you store through the use of standard HTTP requests. The API is interoperable with Amazon's AWS S3 API allowing you to interact with the service while using the tools you already know.

truetraveller 9y ago

I was really excited about DO spaces. I compared every major Object Storage (OVH,B2,Wasabi,S3,Azure). DO spaces came out much ahead. I did dozens of hours of research. I was a customer (and I still am). But I am less excited now. Basically, there are loads of issues with rejected requests because of rate limiting (returns a lot of 503 "slow down" responses). Basically, I don't recall ever receiving this from S3. You can check the forums to see more in-depth discussion. The good part: This is a solvable problem, and I hope they relax these limits very soon. Another great anecdote: their API is 99% compatible with S3. In fact, the official recommendation is to use the AWS SDKs on the server, which I am doing!

aclelland 9y ago
S3 will sometimes return a "503 temporary error" response if you start writing lots of files per second. From my understanding, if they see that your bucket has a constant high write rate they'll make some configuration changes in the background to accommodate the higher write rate. That being said, last month I wrote over 60 million files to S3 and the number of failed writes were tiny (solved by simply retrying the write) I've not used DOs spaces yet, I'd love to know if they guarantee read after write consistency. I know S3 has some issues with that depending on use case. Maybe it's time for another look at spaces.
- truetraveller 9y ago
  Yes, DO spaces is very strict about both GET and PUT. I did a benchmark requests-per-second (literally just fetching a URL a bench of times). I get about ~180 requests per second, after which all requests failed. Amazon S3 is much better in the sense that there IS dynamic scaling if it notices spikes. To the defense of DO, they are newer and their business model is "cheap,cheap,cheap", so they can't compete at the same level.
- _hyn3 9y ago
  S3 will automatically shard your bucket evenly across your sub-namespace if you use pre-shardable names whenever possible. This sounds complex but is actually fairly easy to do. For example, if you are not dealing with randomly generated ID's, try using Base64 encoded keynames rather than the keynames themselves. (A more limited character set is helpful, though.) A better name than user_f38c9123 is f38c9123_user, which will allow a statistically even shard size across the full 16 character range of the first character. As more performance is needed, S3 will automatically shard the second character into 16x16 (256) possible shards, etc. Also, using a more limited character set such as hexadecimal (that is, [[a-f][0-8]]*) (or just numberic digits) for the first characters of a filename will shard more evenly than a full alphanumeric [A-z][0-9][etc]. Jeff Barr had a blog post on this a while ago.. here it is: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-performance-tips-tricks-seattle-hiring-event/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-performance-tips-... "By the way: two or three prefix characters in your hash are really all you need: here’s why. If we target conservative targets of 100 operations per second and 20 million stored objects per partition, a four character hex hash partition set in a bucket or sub-bucket namespace could theoretically grow to support millions of operations per second and over a trillion unique keys before we’d need a fifth character in the hash." We actually do exactly this in Userify (blatant plug, SSH key management, sudo, etc https://userify.com https://userify.com) by just switching the ID type to the end of the string: company_[shortuuid] becomes [shortuuid]_company. It makes full bucket scans for a single keyname a bit easier and faster if you use different buckets for each type of data, but you actually will get better sharding overall by mixing all of your data types together in a single bucket. The trade-off is worth it for the general case.

cyberferret 9y ago

(*) for a particular use case. The example is 200GB storage with 2000GB data transfer (out) every month. That's a LOT of data going out every month, so I am guessing the scenario is if you are hosting a photo library and lots of people are downloading every month. If however you are just using the service as an online storage to hold <100GB of data as backup (i.e. mainly only transfer in), then S3 turns out way cheaper than DO. Not knocking either service - I actually use both, for different use cases.

Blackstone4 9y ago
When you say way cheaper what do you mean? Like savings of ~$5-10 on a spend of $10-20? Or is it material? Like $50
- cyberferret 9y ago
  Well, DO is a minimum of $5 per month (up to 250GB IIRC). 100GB on S3 with just uploads during the month will run under $2.
  - some_account 9y ago
    I think it would be good if people didn't always pick these services based on price, since that's how you end up with one monopoly service and no alternatives. Support alternatives even if they are a bit more expensive.
    - Blackstone4 9y ago
      Agreed. The price difference in a lower usage case is not meaningful. I would choose based on ease of use, reliability and functionality. The main thing stopping me from using Digital Ocean is AWS RDS which is amazing. If they could bring out a similar solution with backups and MySQL and PostgreSQL, that would be amazing. :) I could then run my apps in docker.
    - cyberferret 9y ago
      Well, I actually agree with you. In my first post above my reply, I did say that I actually use both services based on my use cases. Both excellent, and work well (Oh, and I also use the Minio open source solution for one particular project too). Horses for courses.

Lunatic666 9y ago

Is there any open source S3 compatible software? I know Riak Cloud Storage (http://docs.basho.com/riak/cs/2.1.1/ http://docs.basho.com/riak/cs/2.1.1/), but I think it’s not maintained anymore.

cyberferret 9y ago
I believe minio.io provides open source S3 compatible storage on your own servers.
- unixhero 9y ago
  True
unixhero 9y ago
The rclone project supports S3 https://rclone.org/s3/ https://rclone.org/s3/
tobias3 9y ago
OpenStack Swift or Ceph with Ceph Object Gateway. Don't use minio, it's a toy for testing.
- icebraining 9y ago
  I've never used it in production; in what ways is minio lacking compared to Swift and Ceph?
  - tobias3 9y ago
    S3 is an abstraction that gives you a limited amount of operations with limited guarantees (e.g. eventual consistency, can only replace whole files). What you get in return is easier scalability and performance. If you use an S3 API to store files (like minio does) you give up power and gain nothing. So you are better off using NFS, samba, webdav, ftp, etc. Additionally minio doesn't seem to sync files to the file system, so you can't be sure a file is actually stored after a PUT operation (AWS S3 and swift have eventual consistency and Ceph has stronger guarantees).

stagbeetle 9y ago

The main cost seems to be bandwidth (speeds). If you've ever tried Spaces, you know it's a real slog uploading and downloading (even with good client-side speeds). DropBox has similar specs to Spaces, and does it for only $10. OneDrive has the same thing with $7 for 1TB. And there's another Chinese company, Tencent, that gives you 10TB for free (except it's slow and it's all in Chinese). The problem I have with this article (very brief table), is that the author is comparing two "enterprise" solutions to a consumer solution. With "enterprise" solutions, you get guaranteed uptime and speeds. With Spaces, and the rest I've mentioned, you don't get any of that. Only that your data will still be there as long as you pay out.

icebraining 9y ago
Spaces may be slow (never tried it), but it's still a different offering that Dropbox/OneDrive, which are not designed for massive public access. For example, Dropbox has a traffic limit of 200GB/day, which can't be increased.

lyager 9y ago

.. but with a monthly fee, which kind of breaks the idea of “pay as you go”, atleast for my purpose

k__ 9y ago
Haha, yes. But I have to admit, the $5 fees some of these new offerings have is probably to filter out some type of customers.

alexbilbie 9y ago

What is the durability objects stored with DO? S3 offers 11x9s of durability. Likewise what is the replication story? Can you get event notifications when objects are uploaded/deleted? Is there versioning? Static website hosting? Lifecycle management?

icebraining 9y ago
S3 offers 11x9s of durability. So they say, but the SLA doesn't make any promises about durability. https://aws.amazon.com/s3/sla/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/sla/
- alexbilbie 9y ago
  The SLA governs availability. Details of durability here https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/DataDurability.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/DataDurabili...
ngrilly 9y ago
I asked DO about this, and their answer was that 1) data are replicated on-site (in the same data center) but are not replicated to another data center; and 2) as for now Spaces does not provide lifecycle management. As a side note, I think lifecycle management is very useful for backups. A server push its backups to the object storage, but cannot overwrite or delete previous backups. This is useful if the server is hacked...

beegeezuz 9y ago

People who compare DO and AWS don't have a clue about how real world works.

martinald 9y ago

The bandwidth egress charges on AWS (and GCP/Azure) are way too high. It almost seems cartel like. Bandwidth costs have dropped by a huge factor over the past few years; but none of this has been passed on. I really hope backblaze and/or DO manage to cause the big three some hurt on this and get them to reduce prices significantly; 7c/GB is really high these days.

sitepodmatt 9y ago
What are bandwidth costs? This comes up again and again, people see HE.net / Cogent / Level3 / Hibernia / NTT whatever offering 10gig handoff IP transit at a colo neutral location for X per month and somehow determine the true cost. When I suspect the reality is that much of cost is invested in routing equipment both internally and externally, evolving SDN and all the goodness it affords, being able to offer SLA per instance in terms of mbit that can be pushed, being able to mitigate DDOS, hiring top network engineers and researchers, being fully redundant across multiple providers and protected circuits rather than just a lonely hand off - or in GCP case building out the network themselves with multiple SLA tiers, being able to mitagate network issues quicker than a PagerDuty alert at a banwidth blender. Granted I'd say there still probably cushioning in there but judging network costs by comparing to a 10gig handoff at a random colo neutral, or blender, or OVH/Hetznet commodity servers, or Linode/Vultr/DO seems unfair in my opinion.
- martinald 9y ago
  I totally understand that but the price hasn't dropped in what, a decade? My home internet connection (which includes a shedload of last mile costs laying fibre to my apartment) has went from 2mbit/sec to 1gig/sec (for less money in real terms) in a similar timespan. I'm not expecting it to be at the cost of a 10gig cogent connection at LINX, but some drop makes sense. DO/Backblaze pricing seems to be more on the money. Keep in mind these provides also do charge on top for a lot of other networking services (VPCs, NATs etc) which often can really add up, so I'd expect some of the SDN capex to be absorbed by that.
- mrep 9y ago
  I met a network engineer for amazon about a year ago and I brought up the prices since I had heard about them being expensive here on hacker news. He laughed about it and said it was one of their most profitable departments with like a 90% margin.

turblety 9y ago

Sia [1] could be even cheaper, coming out at $1.10 for a TB [2]. Although this price might not be forever, and I'm still not sure about the reliability. In theory it should be more reliable, as it's decentralised and your data gets split among multiple servers around the world. The question remains what if the Sia network itself stops being profitable and people all exit at the same time. Although the same could be said for Amazon? Sia will actually soon be adding a backend to Minio too [3]. The only thing that has stopped me using Sia is you have to have the blockchain running on the machine. 1. https://sia.tech https://sia.tech 2. https://siastats.info/storage_pricing https://siastats.info/storage_pricing 3. https://blog.sia.tech/introducing-s3-style-file-sharing-for-sia-through-the-new-minio-integration-bb880af2366a https://blog.sia.tech/introducing-s3-style-file-sharing-for-...

cyberferret 9y ago
Curious as to why you edited your post to remove mention of the other service that you had listed originally?
- turblety 9y ago
  Sorry @cyberferret. I previously listed Storj [1] but did a bit of research and it didn't actually look cheaper when you consider bandwidth cost. $0.015 per GB per month $0.05 per GB downloaded [1] https://storj.io/ https://storj.io/
  - cyberferret 9y ago
    Cool thanks! I presumed that it didn't meet some sort of criteria that was being discussed here. I just wanted to make sure there were no issues with the service itself per se.
    - digianarchist 9y ago
      They're in closed BETA. I looked into them but they are not that good for long term storage. Plus their payment system is centralized.

SlowBro 9y ago

Maybe I'm missing something, but where is the Azure data?

skc 9y ago
Doesn't seem to be there. Was wondering the same.
kryptkpr 9y ago
Also missing the SoftLayer/IBM S3-compatible offering. We use it very lightly (our IoT firmware builds from CI are going up there) and pay nothing, their free limits are quite generous.

dsacco 9y ago

This is great, but I’m disappointed Backblaze B2 isn’t included. That seems like an oversight unless someone can point out how B2 doesn’t hold its own with these options in a glaring way. There are tradeoffs, but B2 seems to be very competitive overall. B2 is cheaper than every option here for both storage ($0.005/GB) and egress ($0.01/GB).[1] Their transaction pricing is also cheaper.[2] Despite being cheaper, it’s still hot storage, so you can immediately download buckets, in whole or in part. I’ve personally used it to backup (and restore) terabytes of data for over a year. I doubt it has an SLA like GCP or AWS, but DigitalOcean doesn’t either, yet it’s listed here. I find the B2 API documentation to be very readable as well.[3] I’ve used AWS S3, Glacier and GCP Nearline, Coldline. I can’t think of a specific thing that has disappointed me about B2, and the reliability has been excellent. The nature of my work is that I have very large datasets, and B2 becomes extremely competitive when you’re backing up tens of terabytes or more. _________________________________ 1. https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html 2. https://www.backblaze.com/b2/b2-transactions-price.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/b2-transactions-price.html 3. https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/ https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/

truetraveller 9y ago
I really wanted to like B2. I love the docs and super-clean interface. But B2 was just too "weird" when it came to uploading an object. You can't replace an object key, so you always get a new object key when uploading. This is unlike any normal object store, where you can just upload to an existing key. Also, if you upload an object with the same name (e.g. myphoto.png) it creates a new version, and there's no way to stop this. I don't want or need a new version! I have a feeling this restriction is in place because of the underlying "vault" implementation.
- beepbeepbeep1 9y ago
  B2 is great as a backup store. I use it for backup. I wouldn't use it for non backup object storage, as it's in a single data center. S3 and Google Cloud are completely different, I'm not sure on the Google specifics but S3 has data replicated across three AZs.

hacknat 9y ago

I work for a company that has to provision hosted products for customers across all the clouds and the one that has been impressing me the most lately is Azure. The load balancers are also the gateways (sound network topology), so there is no need for elastic IPs, NAT Gateways, or proxy protocol. The other thing I like about Azure is they have storage classes that automatically cross region replicate. The automatic storage encryption is a bit of an issue, but I know they were working on it, last I checked. You can’t beat the offerings of AWS, but there are definitely some compliance scenarios that are easier to fulfill on Azure. We rarely get customer requests for Google Cloud. Seems like it’s mostly Azure and AWS (at least at the enterprise level).

manigandham 9y ago
You don't need any that for load balancing on any cloud. Google Cloud has the best load balancer with a global anycast address that will route to the nearest DC with instances and free capacity. For automatic cross-region replication for storage, are you talking about Azure's GRS class? That's the same as GCP's multiregional class and AWS allows you to setup entire bucket replication to anywhere else in a few clicks.
jacksmith21006 9y ago
You will find the load balancing at Google to be superior to AWS and Azure. Had not used the others.
davidgl 9y ago
https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/07/21/trends-cloud-computing-uses-aws-uses-azure/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/07/21/trends-cloud-computing...

willow_sp 9y ago

Shameless Plug :) I wrote recently a series of articles comparing most of those providers and explaining how to use them with JavaScript: - Amazon S3: https://medium.com/@javidgon/amazon-s3-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-it-with-javascript-701fffc89154 https://medium.com/@javidgon/amazon-s3-pros-cons-and-how-to-... - Google Cloud Storage: https://medium.com/@javidgon/google-cloud-storage-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-it-with-javascript-ea9ce60a94c0 https://medium.com/@javidgon/google-cloud-storage-pros-cons-... - Microsoft Azure Blob Storage: https://medium.com/@javidgon/microsoft-azure-blob-storage-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-it-with-javascript-ca5aaf5d5ffd https://medium.com/@javidgon/microsoft-azure-blob-storage-pr... - Backblaze B2: https://itnext.io/backblaze-b2-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-it-with-javascript-8c2d2a9a69d9 https://itnext.io/backblaze-b2-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-it-w... - DigitalOcean Spaces: https://medium.com/dailyjs/digital-ocean-spaces-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-it-with-javascript-1802559ce2bd https://medium.com/dailyjs/digital-ocean-spaces-pros-cons-an... - Wasabi Hot Storage: https://medium.com/@javidgon/wasabi-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-with-javascript-fa528c3779a2 https://medium.com/@javidgon/wasabi-pros-cons-and-how-to-use...

jopsen 9y ago
shameless request :) trying comparing performance: latency, bandwidth up/down and scalability in the face of many concurrent requests. And then do that wrt. compute resources in various locations.

squid3 9y ago

NodeChef's object storage is very attractive option especially with no data transfer charges. Available in two regions. https://nodechef.com/s3-compatible-object-storage https://nodechef.com/s3-compatible-object-storage

manigandham 9y ago
At $1/GB, it's the most expensive option mentioned on this page by far. Even with GCP's pricey storage, you would have to download your data 10x for this to make sense (or 88x with DO), and that's before considering cross-cloud/transit costs. Also since you're the cofounder of nodechef, you should add a disclaimer when mentioning your own product.

askaboutit 9y ago

Wasabi storage has unlimited egress now. So spaces with its rate limiting doesn’t seem that much of a big deal. Storage is something that won’t make much money in a few years I believe. I think the Egress overcharging maybe finally seeing decent competition. https://wasabi.com/pricing/ https://wasabi.com/pricing/

corobo 9y ago
"unlimited" - It looks like if you actually try to use unlimited you get limited, it's closer to a Dropbox competitor than an s3 competitor > If your use case creates an unreasonable burden on our infrastructure, we reserve the right to limit your egress traffic and/or ask you to switch to our Legacy pricing plan. > Wasabi’s hot cloud storage service is not designed to be used to serve up (for example) web pages at a rate where the downloaded data far exceeds the stored data or any other use case where a small amount of data is served up a large amount of times
- askaboutit 9y ago
  Oh, well that puts a kink in that. They had an example of 1PB costing $90,000 to download from S3. On their old plan it would be $40,000 (quick math). I think if the company was that large S3, comes across as a much better offering.

milesward 9y ago

Cool site, but noticing an error: This compares AWS S3 single region pricing ($0.024/gb) to GCP GCS multi-region pricing ($0.026/gb) rather than GCP GCS single region pricing ($0.020/gb). Hopefully the creator/author will correct the discrepancy... Disclosure: I'm a pricing dweeb at Google Cloud

arghwhat 9y ago
I sincerely hope your business card says "Pricing Dweep, Google Cloud Products". If not, you need to get this fixed.
- milesward 9y ago
  New Card Order: Submitted.
jacksmith21006 9y ago
Thanks for pointing out and noticed the same.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

buryat 9y ago

Would be nice to add things like: - Consistency - First byte latency - Limits on requests - Max upload size - Extra features

robbyt 9y ago
Yes, for example GCP does not have S3's "eventual consistent" behavior. When data is written to GCP, it's available to read immediately.

zbjornson 9y ago

This uses the pricing for multi-regional GCS, which is geo-redundant across two or more locations separated by at least 100 miles. Regional GCS is the storage class equivalent to standard S3 and is $0.02/GB.

milesward 9y ago
Yup, I saw the same thing.
Elect2 9y ago
Corrected.
- milesward 9y ago
  Woo, thx!

manigandham 9y ago

This is a rather simplistic comparison. These object storage services have several tiers and features that you need to take into account like zone vs regional replication, strong-consistency listings, bandwidth and access depending on where your compute is, integrations like notifications and functions, etc. That being said, the clouds are great if your compute is co-located in the same place because the transfer fees are waived. Otherwise DO or B2 are probably better options for less usage or more neutral network locations and egress.

johnnycarcin 9y ago

Azure storage is available in way more than 10 regions FYI: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/services/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/serv...

driverdan 9y ago

You can negotiate lower S3 prices if you're a heavy user. I assume the other companies will as well. By heavy I mean exceeding the lowest price tiers significantly.

erikpukinskis 9y ago

One of the neat features of Microsoft’s storage service is that you can append to existing files. It surprised me that this isn’t standard on other services. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/understanding-block-blobs--append-blobs--and-page-blobs https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/un...