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Cloud Filestore, high-performance file storage for GCP users
- merb 8y agowow the premium filestore is as good as a single ssd (replicated). that's really cool to use for mysql/postgres databases on gke, way cheaper than using GCP SQL if you already have a GKE cluster.
- thesandlord 8y agoWhats the advantage of using NFS instead of just attaching a Persistent Disk to a StatefulSet? Wouldn't that be a lot cheaper?
- manigandham 8y agoNFS is much faster to attach than PD to a GCE node, which can take minutes at times and lead to crash loops waiting for the storage to be ready. This is especially problematic if the disk needs to be moved from one node to another for some reason.
- thesandlord 8y agoThat makes a lot of sense, thanks!
- toredash 8y agoIsn't running databases on NFS, really bad?
- manigandham 8y agoDepends. There's nothing wrong with NFS itself, although v4 is better obviously. There's a performance trade-off with going over the network and sharing the storage with multiple servers, along with the necessary metadata for each file, but if you don't have much contention then it's just like a drive with higher latency. If that latency is low and your workload can handle disk concurrency well then it works fine. It helps if you use (or configure) a database with more sequential access and buffering for large updates rather than lots of random small writes, as well as spreading the data over several disks. AWS EFS has latency problems which make it problematic but this product seems to have better performance profile which could work well.
- toredash 8y agoI get the performance issue but I'm more concerned about data integrity. I did a quick lookup in the MySQL docs (https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/disk-issues.html https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/disk-issues.html) and was surprised that this isn't really an issue. Learned something new, thanks!
- manigandham 8y agoDatabases all use some kind of write-ahead logging so you'll be safe as long as that file is safe, and they're even capable of recovering the file all the way up to any corrupt records that may have been appended at the end. You shouldn't use multiple servers writing to the same volume for database drives, but other than that it's no different than any other disk that might lose connection. Most VMs "local" disks are still attached over the network anyway, emulating a PCIe bus interface instead of NFS.
- stemuk 8y agoThis seems like a really unfortunate name choice to me. When I first read the title I misread it as Cloud Firestore, which just has one letter different to Cloud Filestore.
- rishav_sharan 8y agoAren't these the same? Cloudstore and Firestore are the same product with different branding.
- manigandham 8y ago...no, first of all there is no such thing as Cloudstore. Cloud FIREstore is a document-store database for Firebase, which is the GCP suite of services primarily for mobile apps. Cloud FILEstore is a NFS file system mountable across multiple compute engine VMs.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoVery happy that GCP is opening in LA, however pushing the VFX angle is interesting considering the bulk of that work has moved overseas due to tax credits. Sent the link to a friend at Dreamworks that still has a sizable amount of work in Glendale. Will also be interesting to find out how they are solving/pricing the immense bandwidth/storage requirements needed to make such work practical.
- manigandham 8y agoThey had a big event about this for the media/vfx industry today: https://cloudplatformonline.com/LA-Cloud-Region-Launch-Media-Home.html https://cloudplatformonline.com/LA-Cloud-Region-Launch-Media... The data all lives in the cloud, only the models and specs are sent back and forth. Zync is their rendering tech: https://www.zyncrender.com/ https://www.zyncrender.com/
- gigatexal 8y agopremium tier iops is a fixed perf vs the per GB iops scaling of AWS, nice.
- theDoug 8y agoProduct page: https://cloud.google.com/filestore/ https://cloud.google.com/filestore/ (disclosure: I work in GCP, but not on this product. Just happy to see it go public for more users.)
- khc 8y agoIs it intentional that on the page, there's a list of Partner Solutions that are essentially a competitor of Filestore?
- vishwajeetv 8y agoI think these are the solutions that GCP Partners have created USING Filestore.
- manigandham 8y agoNo, they are alternatives that have existed as solutions before Filestore was created. They still have unique features, better performance and other advantages if you need them.
- theDoug 8y agoExtreme "Just my two cents" mode: user problems may be similar, but needs and solutions remain unique. Any one group trying to build a solution to serve all needs is likely in line for complication, which is why great partners and options continue to be a wise choice. (Gonna duck out of this thread, etc. now since this isn't my release and I assume people who work in storage can go a lot deeper.)
- foobarbazetc 8y agoThey all nominally do the same thing but they all have their pros and cons. It’s like choosing which car to buy. They all get you from A to B, but there are still many options to choose from. ;)
- bhouston 8y agoThey are trying to be nice to the partners they are now competing with.
- _wmd 8y agoThey've undercut Amazon EFS by 33% for the budget option ($.20/gb vs. $.30/gb). Hope this kicks off a little pricing war - shared filesystem is a hugely useful solution for migrating old apps, would be nice if it were cheap. Both options are still grossly overpriced (IMHO)
- mtgx 8y agoAs Amazon starts winning fat government contracts for unaccountable sums of money, it will probably care less and less about offering "value" to its smallest private sector customers.
- oh-kumudo 8y agoAre they? I think Startup customers are very valuable since they are most cost-effective thus providing very good feedbacks.
- privacypoller 8y agoAmazon had better improve its customer service offering, or ramp up its partner network if it wants to win big "enterprisy" clients like government then. The HN crowd may look at the Oracles and IBMs as super-expensive dinosaurs, but they do offer an incredibly high level of help and support.
- Yeroc 8y agoThe same applies to Google. Microsoft appears to have the leg up on Oracle & IBM as far as winning "enterprisy" clients.
- gigatexal 8y agoEver try getting a SQL support request to an engineer actually at Microsoft and not one outsourced and get a response within weeks? Yeah, not easy. Or if you get a response it's the equivalent of "have you tried turning it off and then on again?".
- stevekemp 8y agoEven google's blog is prone to spam-comments!
- oavdeev 8y agoSo now they have two cloud storage products, called Cloud Firestore and Cloud Filestore? Their branding team is on top of their game, as always.
- lazharichir 8y agoFirestore is a NoSQL database, Filestore is a file storage system. If you can discern between "now" and "not" then you can deal with "Firestore" and "Filestore"...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ademup 8y agoI am a bit embarrassed, but I had to read your comment twice to see that you mentioned two different products in your first sentence. So for me at least, GP comment is accurate.
- chrisjc 8y agoI still had to read your comment to notice the difference.
- phamilton 8y agoExcept "w" and "t" aren't similar in pronunciation. While "r" varies a lot in pronunciation across languages and regional dialects, there are many languages where the two ("r" and "l") require the same tongue position and a few languages where the two are (overly simplified) equivalent.
- pvg 8y ago'now' and 'not' are almost always trivially identifiable from context, even when misspelled. Firestore and Filestore are not.
- klodolph 8y agoMost people can tell the difference between /naʊ/ and /nɑt/. I mean, just look at them... one ends with a consonant, one doesn't, and the vowels are reasonably different. The difference here is between /faɪl/ and /ˈfaɪəɹ/, which is much more subtle. It comes down to the difference between /l/ and /əɹ/. The [ə] is an uncommon vowel in languages, unstressed, and mostly subsumed by nearby sounds. And worse, more than a billion people on the planet grew up speaking a language which doesn't distinguish the [l] and [ɹ] sounds (they're both approximants with only slight differences in articulation). So when you say "file" or "fire" these people can't distinguish which one you're saying, and when they say it they use something like the tap [ɾ] or retroflex [ɻ] instead, both of which sound ambiguous to native English speakers. Or some non-native speakers will use [l] exclusively, for both /l/ and /ɹ/.
- evancox100 8y agoThis is also what EDA/ASIC design tools need to move to the cloud.
- madspindel 8y agoWhat is EDA/ASIC design tools? AutoCAD?
- wmf 8y agoChip design stuff like Cadence.
- namibj 8y agoNo, but exotic software people use to design integrated circuits, like a WiFi modem, or a Bitcoin miner. Autodesk, the creator of AutoCAD, sells Eagle, an EDA software. It does not go lower than you can go with a soldering iron, except for allowing solder joints that are better created with hot air / infrared heating, and fancy multi-layer circuit boards with components on the inside.
- dboreham 8y agoe.g. https://www.mentor.com/ https://www.mentor.com/ Much of the EDA world though uses in-house tools, or a mixture of commercial and in-house tooling.
- lazharichir 8y agoThe price is more attractive (read cheaper) than AWS, but it is still on the pricey side considering the storage sizes people work with these days. Using persistent storage with Google sets me back a little over $175 per TB of SSD, per month, without networking factored in. At $0.20, time a thousand for a TB, Cloud Filestore comes to $200. Let's see how the performance goes.
- gigatexal 8y agoSpin up a huge render job, use the perf of the storage, and then nuke the storage as you have a final product? That's probably what they're getting at.
- sbr464 8y agoAre there reliability differences in the persistent ssd and filestore?
- pm90 8y agoLook closely at their announcement: you will see "enterprise" a few times there. While it doesn't make sense from an Individuals perspective, for enterprises it certainly is pretty affordable.
- ec109685 8y agoAre you able to read/write mount persistent storage to multiple instances at the same tome? I believe it is only multiple read only mounts — there can be only one writer.
- shoo 8y agoAt $enterprise-dayjob we've ended up using EFS in AWS after migrating an application that was using NFS. One of the main obstacles to adopting this was perceived lack of security as EFS didn't support encryption of NFS connections between EC2 instances and EFS mount targets. AWS EFS released support for encrypting the NFS connections earlier this year, using Stunnel. What's the corresponding story re security for cloud filestore?
- rrdharan 8y agoNot 100% certain but I don't think hyphen is a valid variable name character in any language whose variable references start with a $.
- regularfry 8y agoSymbols in common lisp and scheme can both start with $ and contain hyphens.
- mlrtime 8y agoHow did you get around the terrible performance of EFS. Are you not read/writing lots of small files?
- haggy 8y agoNobody should be writing many small files to EFS/S3/etc. It's very bad at that.
- brazzledazzle 8y agoNFS in general seems to struggle with that scenario. Do you get better performance with your own NFS server with that type of workload?
- chucky_z 8y agoUnrelated to EFS, but I found Gluster to have good performance for this use-case vs. NFS/CIFS.
- chippy 8y agoHows it compare (pricing / performance) to using Cloud Storage, for non web accessible files. Example use case, screenshots of websites where instances both request and write / overwrite them.
- manigandham 8y agoThis is a product that gives you a file system, like attaching a disk, but over NFS so it's available for multiple servers to mount over the network. If you don't actually need a disk-based file system and just want to read/write individual files as objects, then object storage like Cloud Storage is your best option.
- namibj 8y agoSpecifically, it depends on whether you need random writes to files and/or (some) file locking semantics/consistency.
- chrisprobert 8y agoI'm curious whether this is backed by Google File System (https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/gfs-sosp2003.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...), or something else.
- cobookman 8y agoGoogle Cloud Storage (GCS), an S3 competitor, is backed by Colossus (CNS). [1]. Colossus is the replacement to Google File System (GFS). [1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2014/01/easier-faster-lower-cost-big-data-processing-with-the-google-cloud-storage-connector-for-hadoop.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2014/01/easier-faster-l...
- ebikelaw 8y agoNothing at Google has been backed by GFS in many years. https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-colossus/ https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-colossus/
- puzzle 8y agoWell, the poster probably meant whatever GFS incarnation is around these days (Colossus is v2 or v3, depending on how you look at things). In the end, almost everything at Google is backed by "GFS": Bigtable, Blobstore, GCS, Spanner, Megastore, etc. There's little else that is not backed by GFS, but talks to D directly. At least that has been mentioned in public, of course. Still, none of it is user facing/serving, though.
- manigandham 8y agoJudging by pricing and performance, it's mostly likely using their existing Persistent Disks offering and wrapping it in a managed NFS layer. https://cloud.google.com/persistent-disk/ https://cloud.google.com/persistent-disk/
- manigandham 8y agoThis is great for persistent storage on Kubernetes clusters. Storage has been complicated so far and while there are external solutions for pooling and replicating locally attached disks, this is much nicer and simpler for most uses.
- cowmix 8y agoThe performance of EFS is horrible. I hope this is better. On paper, it seems more performant.
- ebikelaw 8y ago"Typical" availability number is both low and wishy-washy.
- paulsutter 8y agoAs convenient as this seems, there are good reason that many shops prohibit the use of NFS in production. There’s nothing to prevent any application from doing full error checks on every disk i/o call, dealing with timeouts, etc. Except that nobody wrote that stuff into software designed for local disk.
- tannhaeuser 8y ago> As convenient as this seems, there are good reason that many shops prohibit the use of NFS in production. Such as?
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoReliability issues, IME.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mleonard 8y agoA few questions come to mind after reading the docs (minus the currently 404ing ones): (1) is this a zonal or regional product? ie does it replicate data across zones in a region? (2) roughly what latencies should I expect to see? eg for the following: a 1KG, 1MB, 1GB read and write. Any info here would be helpful. (3) does it have close-to-open consistency? or something weaker / stronger? (4) any plans to add gcp pub/sub integration somehow? would be great to be able to subscribe to changes like with other gcp storage products. (5) any plans to move from NFSv3 to NFSv4? (6) backups available or planned as a feature? eg to GCS (7) can you share anything about how it is implemented? Thanks
- danra 8y agoGiven Google's history, is there any good reason to believe this service would still be supported by Google in a few years and not be replaced by yet another new-and-of-course-much-better-than-the-old-one iteration?
- outworlder 8y agoIs this history relevant for the Google Cloud Platform? Or are we still talking about RSS readers?
- tonfa 8y agoAre you referring to a particular GCP feature that got turned down after reaching GA?
- numbsafari 8y agoIt's currently in Beta, which means it will hopefully eventually go GA. As with any product from any company ever, just because it's in beta doesn't mean it necessary ever goes GA. In the case of Google Cloud Platform products, many of them [1] are subject to the deprecation policy [2]. Basically it states that they'll give you one year advance notice of any intent to deprecate those products. This is functionally the exact same policy as that offered by AWS [3]. [1] https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation [2] https://cloud.google.com/terms/ https://cloud.google.com/terms/ (see Section 7) [3] https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/#2._Changes https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/#2._Changes.
- paulddraper 8y agoI wasn't aware of Google retracting or abandoning any GCP offerings. Rather, they seem to double down on all of them. I guess you could say this is the replacement for Cloud Storage FUSE [1], but it's not and if it were I don't see the problem with that. [1] https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gcs-fuse https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/gcs-fuse
- remus 8y agoGoogle's long history of supporting their paid products, you mean?