45 ms·

> if you can tolerate a delay, use Glacier S3 recently added a Coldline-like "Glacier Instant Retrieval" class, FYI. Their "Deep Archive" class (the cheapest)

• Dylan16807 5y ago
  > AFAIK, the GCS Archive tier has the same availability characteristics as Coldline and the same latency as all GCS class (10s of milliseconds). That's true as far as I know. And the combination of "the data is accessible instantly" with "there is no low priority retrieval, there is only the ultra expensive kind" implies that their architecture is extremely weird and/or some very manipulative pricing is happening.
  • the-rc 5y ago
    Neither. It only means that hot and cold storage live right next to each other and pricing is used as a carrot/stick, as well as a signal, so that the two classes tend to stay the same (mainly to prevent cold from getting hot, of course) and a desirable balance is preserved. You could call it manipulative, if you want, but it's more like incentives.
    • Dylan16807 5y ago
      Amazon can apparently get data cheaply out of cold storage with a day or so of warning. Can google not do that? And if they did, they could still maintain the same kind of tiering. If they can't do it, that's a very strange system. If they refuse to do it, that's manipulative. For archival storage Google's charging three and a half years of storage costs to retrieve data. Even in the most flattering scenario where roughly all of the cost is in doing the I/O, and disk space is "free", that implies that retrieval is at least 75% profit. If I/O is half the cost of storage and disk space is half the cost of storage, then retrieval approaches 90% profit.
      • immibis 5y ago
        Sir, we live in a capitalist economy. Prices don't mirror costs.
        • Dylan16807 5y ago
          My complaint is that the competition is awful here. Capitalism is supposed to pit companies against each other and drive profit margins below 50%. And it's failing to do that here. And moreso, it's a very cruel pricing system because it lures you in with low numbers, then overcharges to get your data back when you need it. Being antagonistic to your customers does have negative effects in the long run. And I think it's worth pointing out situations like that when people are shopping around.
      • the-rc 5y ago
        If you're doing disaster recovery, do you really want to wait a day for your data? I don't understand why you want Google to slow things down. Why can't Amazon get cold data faster? It's fairly simple: all Google storage is online. There is public material on how it all works. Maybe you can ask them to add an artificial delay. There is offline storage, yes, but that's tape, which has bigger issues... Your pricing model is flawed, because you're not taking into account other factors such as rebalancing. Years ago, I would have loved for retrieval to be that cheap to perform behind the scenes.
        • Dylan16807 5y ago
          > If you're doing disaster recovery, do you really want to wait a day for your data? I'd like to have the option. The point isn't that I want to wait, it's that I want it to be super low priority to make it cheaper. For a super low priority job, why should reading be multiple times as expensive as writing? > Your pricing model is flawed, because you're not taking into account other factors such as rebalancing. Years ago, I would have loved for retrieval to be that cheap to perform behind the scenes. I don't understand. If rebalancing happens behind the scenes, then that has to get paid for as part of storage. Which means the cost of 1 single I/O is a smaller fraction of the storage cost. Which means the profit margin for retrieval is significantly higher than my estimate. My cost estimate uses the most flattering possible case for the retrieval pricing. Any storage costs I didn't account for, deliberately or accidentally, make my argument stronger.