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So... who actually uses them in the age of AWS / S3. Is this becoming a much much much smaller group?
by coding123 8y ago
So... who actually uses them in the age of AWS / S3. Is this becoming a much much much smaller group?
- SteveNuts 8y agoDon't forget about glacier.
- Phlarp 8y agoI thought the consensus on glacier was that it was optical backed storage? Has that changed?
- wmf 8y agoI would say there has never been a consensus. The Glacier API is defined such that it could be backed by any technology. It's possible that early "MVP" versions of Glacier were just S3 with lower pricing and artificial delays. Once demand was established, they could have swapped out the backend with MAID, tape, optical, or some combination. There are a lot of comments out there saying "everyone knows Glacier is X" but nobody says "I know Glacier is X".
- gwbas1c 8y agohttps://aws.amazon.com/glacier/ https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/ Looks like tape as a service.
- sneak 8y agoGlacier’s actual storage backend technology has never been disclosed, although this is plausible. Other proposed technologies are racks of older (less efficient) disks that are not always spun up, huge slow flash memory banks, et c.
- sliken 8y agoSome past hacker news thread made a plausible case for 12" optical disks, much like bluray.
- jjeaff 8y agoIt's expensive enough to be anything but ssds really. Glacier is more expensive that b2 from backblaze and they use hot storage regular HDDs And that's not taking into account the extra money Amazon makes from the requests and data transfer that could offset storage costs. I wouldn't be surprised if the glacier data was mixed right in with s3 storage. Just deprioritized when io is high.
- hyperion2010 8y agoLast I heard the best thinking on glacier was that it was the dead space on the normal s3 drives which is inaccessible at normal SLA levels because IO is saturated.
- chias 8y agoI would say AWS / S3 almost certainly uses them for backups. So, depending on your outlook, everyone who relies on S3 does by extension.
- gpapilion 8y agoS3 does not use tapes to backup. It’s reliant on large scale and erasure coding to achieve its slo around storage. They aren’t looking for point in time recovery, they only guarantee availability. I’d say this the same for any systems optimizing for availability over RPO.
- chias 8y agoInteresting! Thank you.
- snaky 8y agoIt might be hard to imagine reading HN, that outside of SV there are more businesses who use tapes than businesses who use AWS.