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Why do people use Amazon S3 when Backblaze B2 is 1/4 the cost of S3 and also includes a CDN for free. You also get way faster access speeds with Backblaze vs Am

Why do people use Amazon S3 when Backblaze B2 is 1/4 the cost of S3 and also includes a CDN for free. You also get way faster access speeds with Backblaze vs Amazon since they tier their IO speeds. https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html

smeyer 7y ago
I think a big reason is that people are using the rest of the amazon ecosystem. If your costs aren't primarily storage, you might be willing to pay a premium to use something that integrates nicely with other services you're using. Here's an article[0] that does some other comparisons between providers and mentions things like upload speed and security features. [0] https://www.cloudwards.net/azure-vs-amazon-s3-vs-google-vs-backblaze-b2/ https://www.cloudwards.net/azure-vs-amazon-s3-vs-google-vs-b...
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
IAM access control, ease of use, reliability, speed.
mythz 7y ago
Where's the info about the free CDN?
- nielsole 7y ago
  Check Cloudflare bandwidth alliance
  - mythz 7y ago
    This bandwidth alliance? https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ Cloudfare is a featured integration that only mentions that transfer fees are free not that CDN hosting is free: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/content-delivery.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/content-delivery.html Cloudfare does have a free CDN tier "For individuals with a personal website and anyone who wants to explore Cloudflare." but it's not the same as B2 including a CDN for free, even Azure is apart of the bandwidth alliance.
    - big_chungus 7y ago
      Right, but it means you can basically (ab?)use Cloudflare to get free egress from B2 storage. Cloudflare won't get too mad until you start hitting terabytes per month; even the free tier doesn't have restrictions. You can also turn on an extremely aggressive caching policy with a page rule that will keep everything under a given subdomain for a month. This makes the "free CDN" part easy, though again, people who do this run the risk of getting their accounts terminated.
  - partiallypro 7y ago
    You just get a discount on data egress, it's not free.
    - penagwin 7y ago
      It depends on the partner. For Backblaze specifically it is indeed free.
koolba 7y ago
Paying for outbound bandwidth is a big one.
- rvnx 7y ago
  In the same way, why people use Backblaze when they can use Wasabi and not pay the bandwidth ? https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/ https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/
  - quellhorst 7y ago
    Wasabi charges a minimum of 3 months of storage on anything uploaded.
  - tux3 7y ago
    I looked at Wasabi some time ago, but their pricing is a LOT less simple than their headline says it is. The major caveats are hidden away in their pricing FAQ: they charge a 1TB minimum if you use less, and there's a 90 days minimum retention period, meaning if you update a file a few times you will pay for the full 90 days of every intermediate version. Additionally, they reserve the right to make you pay for egress if it looks like you transfer more than you have stored. So all in all, Wasabi might be the right fit for you if you store >1TB of files that are infrequently updated and get less than 1 download/month on average. If you fit that use case, I think their free egress pricing is awesome, but it's definitely not for everyone.
  - Youden 7y ago
    If I understand right, if you put CloudFlare in front of Backblaze, you get free bandwidth thanks to Bandwidth Alliance: https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/backblaze/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/backblaze/
    - pzmarzly 7y ago
      Not unlimited, and not for all use cases. Check out Cloudflare ToS.
  - 7y ago
kissgyorgy 7y ago
Because of vendor lock in. When you move a lot of data between S3 and EC2 it costs nothing (or very cheap). When you move data outside of AWS, there is extra cost, so it might not even be cheaper overall.
mceachen 7y ago
Unless you're a bootstrapped startup with just a couple people, paying the AWS bill is not something the engineer probably thinks about too much. Setting up a new billing account with another company is just enough friction to just use whatever AWS offers and call it a day. Also, most employees aren't really incentivized to reduce or minimize infrastructure expenses.
mritun 7y ago
There are usually many reason: 1. Scale - S3 is big - really really big! You don’t need to care if you store one KB or several petabytes. 2. Tiers: the default on S3 is several way replicated storage with 11 9s of durability with high availability. However you can select from cheaper options with the trade off you are happy with. 3. Cost: S3 has reduced prices several times, you can be reasonably sure your costs will go down over time on per unit basis.
overcast 7y ago
Here's one reason I would need something like S3. Sure, I hack all that together into something barely functional myself, but it's not worth it. Pretty handy. https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/serverless-image-handler/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/serverless-image-handler/
- bwilliams18 7y ago
  I too use the serverless image handler but it's not perfect. The documentation is really crappy and over the summer they transitioned the whole system from thumbor to sharp and didn't provide great backwards compatibility.
meritt 7y ago
Because the rest of my infrastructure currently runs on AWS and aws egress charges are far more expensive than the b2 savings.
- rsync 7y ago
  Genuinely curious ... do you not assign any value to having a backup outside of Amazon ? AWS can certainly provide geographical diversity, but on the organizational abstraction layer, all eggs are in one basket, yes ? Is having organizational redundancy something you assign zero value to, or something whose value conflicts with the egress costs so as to make it a difficult decision ? Again, genuinely very interested ...
  - konschubert 7y ago
    Not OP, but of all the things that could kill the startup I work at, AWS shutting down is about on spot 63864664 on the list.
  - kevstev 7y ago
    We attempted to be cloud agnostic (using terraform instead of CloudFormation for example) and then later multi-cloud. The amount of complexity and cost around it was just too much. If AWS goes down, more or less a good portion of the internet goes dark. It's an acceptable risk at this point unless you are truly massive and entirely self contained- if you are using any 3rd party services, IE for auth, payment, whatever- they may be using AWS as well and you are still exposed.
  - gnulinux 7y ago
    I mean we have like 2 millions of line of python code written for lambda, S3, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, Redshift etc using boto3. So if AWS dies, it's not like data backup will save my startup. We're dead.
    - ISL 7y ago
      That sounds troublesome, no?
cheeze 7y ago
Last I checked, Backblaze still stores most data in 1 location, no? So, durability of data (which to be fair doesn't matter for most s3 use cases), and interop with literally everything else in AWS Intelligent data tiering Actual access control Pre signed URLs
- chocolatkey 7y ago
  I've combined cloudflare workers with backblaze to implement etags, signed URLs, etc. Backblaze is part of CF's bandwidth alliance so your bandwidth fee is zero. This makes for a very low monthly cost
  - SergeAx 7y ago
    Can you elaborate further about this setup? Is there an article or a FAQ topic about it?
    - atYevP 7y ago
      Yev from Backblaze here -> the Nodecraft folks did a great job with that project -> https://jross.me/free-personal-image-hosting-with-backblaze-b2-and-cloudflare-workers/ https://jross.me/free-personal-image-hosting-with-backblaze-...
      - SergeAx 7y ago
        Hi, Yev! Thanks a lot. I am fancying the idea to move our CDN from AWS stack to B2 + CF, thanks to Bandwidth Alliance. There's at least one thing stopping me: for simple schema of hosting static content out of bucket we should deploy Workers just for URL rewriting. Guys from CF recommending that way and not URL rewrites by simple rules[1]. But it puts us in a weak position of raising cost twice: for increased edge trafic AND for increased number of requests. Can anything be done on BackBlaze side to address the problem, like custom domains for buckets? Like https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/bucket-name/file.jpg https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/bucket-name/file.jpg => https://bucket-name.f001.backblazeb2.com/file.jpg https://bucket-name.f001.backblazeb2.com/file.jpg ? [1] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/page-rule-setting-request-rewrite/45491/4 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/page-rule-setting-request...
partiallypro 7y ago
If you're with another cloud provider, you still have to pay egress fees to Backblaze. That cancels out the cost savings.
bithavoc 7y ago
B2 does not implement the S3 API. Also the B2 API is much slower than S3.
- brianwski 7y ago
  Disclaimer: I work for Backblaze so I'm biased. :-) > the B2 API is much slower than S3. This is "generally true" for 1 upload thread. We aren't even sure what Amazon is doing differently, but they can be a little faster in general for 1 thread (some people only see 20% faster, some see as high as 50% faster, might be latency to the datacenter and where you are located). As long as you use multiple threads, I make the radical claim that B2 can be faster than Amazon S3. The B2 API is slightly better in that we don't go through any load balancers like S3 does, so there is no choke point. What this means is that in B2 40 threads are actually uploading to 40 separate servers in 40 separate "vaults" and none of the threads could possibly know the other threads are uploading and it does not "choke" through a load balancer. This was all designed originally so that 1 million individual laptops could upload backups all at the same time with no issues and no load balancers. And it works great every day. Practically speaking, for most people in most applications, this means both Amazon S3 and Backblaze B2 are essentially free of any limitations. If you aren't using enough of your bandwidth, spawn a few more threads (on either platform) and soak your upload capacity. But in full disclosure, if your application is only single threaded, yes, B2 tends to be 20% slower for that 1 thread.
leokennis 7y ago
I use B2 as “cold storage” of large-ish files. It’s incredible how low the monthly bills are.
bob1029 7y ago
I am strongly considering B2 as an option for a dropbox-style system. Something where I run 8-16TB of hot tier on my local LAN, with B2 serving as the slower mass storage tier behind it. It seems that the average B2 access latencies would be ~100-200ms, which is very tolerable for a cache miss on such a massive tier of storage. With this amount of space available you could have pre-fetch rules that do things like pull down entire directories as files within them are accessed.

smeyer 7y ago

I think a big reason is that people are using the rest of the amazon ecosystem. If your costs aren't primarily storage, you might be willing to pay a premium to use something that integrates nicely with other services you're using. Here's an article[0] that does some other comparisons between providers and mentions things like upload speed and security features. [0] https://www.cloudwards.net/azure-vs-amazon-s3-vs-google-vs-backblaze-b2/ https://www.cloudwards.net/azure-vs-amazon-s3-vs-google-vs-b...

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago

IAM access control, ease of use, reliability, speed.

mythz 7y ago

Where's the info about the free CDN?

nielsole 7y ago
Check Cloudflare bandwidth alliance
- mythz 7y ago
  This bandwidth alliance? https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ Cloudfare is a featured integration that only mentions that transfer fees are free not that CDN hosting is free: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/content-delivery.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/content-delivery.html Cloudfare does have a free CDN tier "For individuals with a personal website and anyone who wants to explore Cloudflare." but it's not the same as B2 including a CDN for free, even Azure is apart of the bandwidth alliance.
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    Right, but it means you can basically (ab?)use Cloudflare to get free egress from B2 storage. Cloudflare won't get too mad until you start hitting terabytes per month; even the free tier doesn't have restrictions. You can also turn on an extremely aggressive caching policy with a page rule that will keep everything under a given subdomain for a month. This makes the "free CDN" part easy, though again, people who do this run the risk of getting their accounts terminated.
- partiallypro 7y ago
  You just get a discount on data egress, it's not free.
  - penagwin 7y ago
    It depends on the partner. For Backblaze specifically it is indeed free.

koolba 7y ago

Paying for outbound bandwidth is a big one.

rvnx 7y ago
In the same way, why people use Backblaze when they can use Wasabi and not pay the bandwidth ? https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/ https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/
- quellhorst 7y ago
  Wasabi charges a minimum of 3 months of storage on anything uploaded.
- tux3 7y ago
  I looked at Wasabi some time ago, but their pricing is a LOT less simple than their headline says it is. The major caveats are hidden away in their pricing FAQ: they charge a 1TB minimum if you use less, and there's a 90 days minimum retention period, meaning if you update a file a few times you will pay for the full 90 days of every intermediate version. Additionally, they reserve the right to make you pay for egress if it looks like you transfer more than you have stored. So all in all, Wasabi might be the right fit for you if you store >1TB of files that are infrequently updated and get less than 1 download/month on average. If you fit that use case, I think their free egress pricing is awesome, but it's definitely not for everyone.
- Youden 7y ago
  If I understand right, if you put CloudFlare in front of Backblaze, you get free bandwidth thanks to Bandwidth Alliance: https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/backblaze/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/backblaze/
  - pzmarzly 7y ago
    Not unlimited, and not for all use cases. Check out Cloudflare ToS.
- 7y ago

kissgyorgy 7y ago

Because of vendor lock in. When you move a lot of data between S3 and EC2 it costs nothing (or very cheap). When you move data outside of AWS, there is extra cost, so it might not even be cheaper overall.

mceachen 7y ago

Unless you're a bootstrapped startup with just a couple people, paying the AWS bill is not something the engineer probably thinks about too much. Setting up a new billing account with another company is just enough friction to just use whatever AWS offers and call it a day. Also, most employees aren't really incentivized to reduce or minimize infrastructure expenses.

mritun 7y ago

There are usually many reason: 1. Scale - S3 is big - really really big! You don’t need to care if you store one KB or several petabytes. 2. Tiers: the default on S3 is several way replicated storage with 11 9s of durability with high availability. However you can select from cheaper options with the trade off you are happy with. 3. Cost: S3 has reduced prices several times, you can be reasonably sure your costs will go down over time on per unit basis.

overcast 7y ago

Here's one reason I would need something like S3. Sure, I hack all that together into something barely functional myself, but it's not worth it. Pretty handy. https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/serverless-image-handler/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/serverless-image-handler/

bwilliams18 7y ago
I too use the serverless image handler but it's not perfect. The documentation is really crappy and over the summer they transitioned the whole system from thumbor to sharp and didn't provide great backwards compatibility.

meritt 7y ago

Because the rest of my infrastructure currently runs on AWS and aws egress charges are far more expensive than the b2 savings.

rsync 7y ago
Genuinely curious ... do you not assign any value to having a backup outside of Amazon ? AWS can certainly provide geographical diversity, but on the organizational abstraction layer, all eggs are in one basket, yes ? Is having organizational redundancy something you assign zero value to, or something whose value conflicts with the egress costs so as to make it a difficult decision ? Again, genuinely very interested ...
- konschubert 7y ago
  Not OP, but of all the things that could kill the startup I work at, AWS shutting down is about on spot 63864664 on the list.
- kevstev 7y ago
  We attempted to be cloud agnostic (using terraform instead of CloudFormation for example) and then later multi-cloud. The amount of complexity and cost around it was just too much. If AWS goes down, more or less a good portion of the internet goes dark. It's an acceptable risk at this point unless you are truly massive and entirely self contained- if you are using any 3rd party services, IE for auth, payment, whatever- they may be using AWS as well and you are still exposed.
- gnulinux 7y ago
  I mean we have like 2 millions of line of python code written for lambda, S3, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, Redshift etc using boto3. So if AWS dies, it's not like data backup will save my startup. We're dead.
  - ISL 7y ago
    That sounds troublesome, no?

cheeze 7y ago

Last I checked, Backblaze still stores most data in 1 location, no? So, durability of data (which to be fair doesn't matter for most s3 use cases), and interop with literally everything else in AWS Intelligent data tiering Actual access control Pre signed URLs

chocolatkey 7y ago
I've combined cloudflare workers with backblaze to implement etags, signed URLs, etc. Backblaze is part of CF's bandwidth alliance so your bandwidth fee is zero. This makes for a very low monthly cost
- SergeAx 7y ago
  Can you elaborate further about this setup? Is there an article or a FAQ topic about it?
  - atYevP 7y ago
    Yev from Backblaze here -> the Nodecraft folks did a great job with that project -> https://jross.me/free-personal-image-hosting-with-backblaze-b2-and-cloudflare-workers/ https://jross.me/free-personal-image-hosting-with-backblaze-...
    - SergeAx 7y ago
      Hi, Yev! Thanks a lot. I am fancying the idea to move our CDN from AWS stack to B2 + CF, thanks to Bandwidth Alliance. There's at least one thing stopping me: for simple schema of hosting static content out of bucket we should deploy Workers just for URL rewriting. Guys from CF recommending that way and not URL rewrites by simple rules[1]. But it puts us in a weak position of raising cost twice: for increased edge trafic AND for increased number of requests. Can anything be done on BackBlaze side to address the problem, like custom domains for buckets? Like https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/bucket-name/file.jpg https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/bucket-name/file.jpg => https://bucket-name.f001.backblazeb2.com/file.jpg https://bucket-name.f001.backblazeb2.com/file.jpg ? [1] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/page-rule-setting-request-rewrite/45491/4 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/page-rule-setting-request...

partiallypro 7y ago

If you're with another cloud provider, you still have to pay egress fees to Backblaze. That cancels out the cost savings.

bithavoc 7y ago

B2 does not implement the S3 API. Also the B2 API is much slower than S3.

brianwski 7y ago
Disclaimer: I work for Backblaze so I'm biased. :-) > the B2 API is much slower than S3. This is "generally true" for 1 upload thread. We aren't even sure what Amazon is doing differently, but they can be a little faster in general for 1 thread (some people only see 20% faster, some see as high as 50% faster, might be latency to the datacenter and where you are located). As long as you use multiple threads, I make the radical claim that B2 can be faster than Amazon S3. The B2 API is slightly better in that we don't go through any load balancers like S3 does, so there is no choke point. What this means is that in B2 40 threads are actually uploading to 40 separate servers in 40 separate "vaults" and none of the threads could possibly know the other threads are uploading and it does not "choke" through a load balancer. This was all designed originally so that 1 million individual laptops could upload backups all at the same time with no issues and no load balancers. And it works great every day. Practically speaking, for most people in most applications, this means both Amazon S3 and Backblaze B2 are essentially free of any limitations. If you aren't using enough of your bandwidth, spawn a few more threads (on either platform) and soak your upload capacity. But in full disclosure, if your application is only single threaded, yes, B2 tends to be 20% slower for that 1 thread.

leokennis 7y ago

I use B2 as “cold storage” of large-ish files. It’s incredible how low the monthly bills are.

bob1029 7y ago

I am strongly considering B2 as an option for a dropbox-style system. Something where I run 8-16TB of hot tier on my local LAN, with B2 serving as the slower mass storage tier behind it. It seems that the average B2 access latencies would be ~100-200ms, which is very tolerable for a cache miss on such a massive tier of storage. With this amount of space available you could have pre-fetch rules that do things like pull down entire directories as files within them are accessed.