6 ms·

Is being 100% open-source really the motivating factor to use this over S3? I would think the only factors vs using this over S3 would be price and reliability/

Is being 100% open-source really the motivating factor to use this over S3? I would think the only factors vs using this over S3 would be price and reliability/performance. I could care less if this is open source, if I'm going to offload my data to a 3rd party, open source or not and I'm worried about privacy I'm going to encrypt it. I honestly could care less what happens on the back-end, just commit to a data loss and reliability SLA and I'm happy. If you can support my use case, or have reliable performance near 370k requests/sec (http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/10/amazon-s3-566-billion-objects-370000-requestssecond-and-hiring.html http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/10/amazon-s3-566-billion-obj...) and be cheaper than S3 then we'll talk.

Egregore 15y ago
Yes, being opens source is motivation, because you can create your own cloud with your own hardware when you need it. And it's additional assurance that you'll be able to deploy your system even if they go out of business.
- edanm 15y ago
  Is there anyone, anywhere, who considers that as a plus? Who would actually consider rolling out their own cloud infrastructure?
  - notmyname 15y ago
    Actually, many people consider it. Some are simply cautious about hosting their data with a third party. Some are prevented from using a third party for compliance or regulatory reasons. Also, it's generally more cost-effective for extremely large datasets to be self-hosted rather than hosted by a third party.
    - edanm 15y ago
      Aren't the bulk of customers who turn to the cloud rather small operations, who are trying to "outsource" as much of their infrastructure issues as possible? And aren't these customers much more concerned about pricing, rather than possible future growth? Note: I don't mean to ask this sarcastically. I'm actually asking.
      - notmyname 15y ago
        From my experience working with Rackspace Cloud Files, customer sizes are all over the map. Some customers are very small. Some are very large. I know that S3 has a similar variance in customer size. From my experience talking to users (and potential users) of Openstack (http://openstack.org http://openstack.org), there again is variance. Most people are relatively small (a few hundred GB to a few hundred TB). Some are much bigger (several PB). The most exciting thing I heard was that CERN is evaluating Openstack swift (http://swift.openstack.org http://swift.openstack.org) for their storage needs. A researcher from CERN gave a keynote at the last Openstack design summit. CERN generates 25 PB / year and has a 20 year retention policy. They have vast storage needs. The storage needs vary greatly. I've seen that outsourcing infrastructure is great to a point, but the largest users can generally get substantial cost savings by bringing their infrastructure back in house.
  - mseebach 15y ago
    The cloud is great for scaling, but once you have a large dataset and more-or-less predictable growth, it could easily become more economic to handle it your self. Using something like Nimbus would make such a migration easier. On the other hand, it's not like the S3 interface is rocket-science. Re-writing your apps file-storage interaction is the least of the effort in a multi-terabyte-migration.
  - asharp 15y ago
    A cloud hosting provider.
  - spatten 15y ago
    A lot of Canadian companies are unable to use S3 (or EC2) due to the Patriot Act. Sure, they can get around this by using European buckets, but that kind of sucks for latency. I can easily imagine setting up a company using this software with servers in Canada using this software. So yes, it's a plus. (It's not just Canada of course, and it's not just the Patriot act. Gambling companies, for example, can't host in the US)
- blackiron 15y ago
  The license for server-side code - the one you would use to create your own cloud - is AGPL. Isn't this license too restrictive for business?.
  - hugoroy 15y ago
    Why would it be? It's the same as the GPL, only difference is: modified version sources must be available to remote-network-interaction users. I don't see what's restrictive for business.
    - mseebach 15y ago
      If you go and sell somebody a hosting solution based on Nimbus, you'd need to share your source code. What I'm not sure of, is if you build, say, a photo sharing webapp using Nimbus as the storage back-end, does your webapp become AGPL by linking? I'm fairly certain GPL would require this, but, as per the rationale for AGPL, you don't care about that when you run a webapp. Curiously, if Nimbus adopted the exact S3 API instead of "similar to", it would not constitute linking, as it's using a standard interface.
      - justincormack 15y ago
        AGPL uses the same definition of linking as GPL so communication over a network API to a storage backend is not linking. http://www.quora.com/Does-the-AGPL-extend-the-idea-of-linking-to-include-network-access http://www.quora.com/Does-the-AGPL-extend-the-idea-of-linkin...
        mseebach 15y ago
        Ah, thanks for that. I was under the impression that the bar for linking across the network was rather higher.
- JoeAltmaier 15y ago
  Its a leap that folks desiring cloud storage will want to host their own some day. I think its a little like "I want an open-source car, so when they switch back to horses, I'm ready!"
  - bmelton 15y ago
    It's less like that than it is "When we're operating at a scale that makes it more affordable to own hardware than to lease, then it'd be nice if we could." The other unmentioned benefit is in scratching your own itch. If you want feature X, and Amazon won't give it to you, you can develop it in-house and host it yourself.
  - jasongullickson 15y ago
    I think it's more like saying "I want a drivers license, so when I can afford a car I don't have to keep riding the bus."
- rarrrrrr 15y ago
  (SpiderOak / Nimbus.io cofounder here) In addition to supporting the founders personal ethics about software freedom, we feel an open source backend is important for just the sake of confidence. Some people will want to purchase the minimum of 10 machines and host a Nimbus.io storage cluster themselves (and we are also making our hardware specs open source.) Other cloud storage providers may even do this. We hope a few people will consider the hosted option, paying Nimbus.io $0.06 per GB. In any case, all of these are a win for us. We're already spending money every day to maintain a reliable storage backend for our encrypted Backup & Sync business at SpiderOak.com. Nimbus.io is an evolution from that. Community involvement here is most welcome. :) Aside from that, it's just a design we are excited to share. Every other distributed storage system I could find uses replication instead of parity. A system based on parity sacrifices latency but can deliver higher throughput on individual requests (at about 1/3 the cost.) There are use cases even outside of archival storage where this is attractive.
  - hemancuso 15y ago
    I don't see how a parity based implementation can work in a meaningful way across multiple datacenters. You certainly couldn't rebuild if you lost an entire datacenter due to disaster. Replication is the only way here. So any comparison to S3 in that regard is meaningless - Nimbus can't achieve that level of durability, correct? Additionally, if you're just doing parity across multiple chassis in a single datacenter and lost a couple racks do to a power outage it would seem the network would likely shit the bed trying to rebuild, potentially bringing the whole system down. Have you guys worked through nastier failure cases that architectures like S3 can avoid?
    - rarrrrrr 15y ago
      Excellent points. Geographic redundancy with parity compliments the network topology we find in many cities: a metro area fiber ring connecting many data centers with low cost site-to-site (not internet) bandwidth. It's even lower cost to just buy excess capacity with lower QOS. Every archival storage provider I've talked to has a write-heavy workload. Write traffic maybe more than 3x read traffic. So for example in this situation replicating between two sites requires a site-to-site connection equal to the size of the incoming data. Since site-to-site connections are full-duplex, in the parity system the bandwidth for reads and writes is provided at a similar price to what would be spent on replication bandwidth for writes. That said, the first iterations of Nimbus.io won't provide geo redundancy beyond the geo-redundancy that creating an offsite backup inherently provides. We expect to add on geo redundancy storage as an upgrade option at a slightly higher price (still way under S3.) Replying to your second point: If transient conditions like only a couple racks lost power, the system wouldn't trigger an automatic rebuild right away. It would continue to service requests with parity and hinted-handoff until the machines come back online. In any case, when the system decides a full rebuild is needed, the rebuild rate is balanced with servicing new requests (similar to how a RAID controller can give tunable priority to rebuild vs. traffic.)
- methodin 15y ago
  Isn't that the whole point of S3 - you don't need to make your own cloud with your own hardware?
hopescope 15y ago
"I could care less if this is open source" David Mitchell explains why this phrase makes no sense and means exactly that opposite of what you want to say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw
- michael_dorfman 15y ago
  The phrase is usually used ironically: "I could care less" is used to mean the opposite "I couldn't care less". Similarly, when my daughter says "Nice hat, Dad", she is not actually complimenting me on my choice of haberdashery, but rather, pointing out that she thinks it is not nice at all. This message brought you by Irony: Making Communication More Interesting Since the Dawn of Language.
  - verroq 15y ago
    You are talking about sarcasm. Not irony. And a commonly made grammar mistake isn't irony. Unless your whole post was wrapped in a big <sarcasm> tag and I've just made a fool out of myself.
    - michael_dorfman 15y ago
      The relationship between sarcasm and irony is subtle; sarcasm often makes use of irony, but is characterized by its "biting" nature. The quote from my daughter is ironic and sarcastic; the quote about "caring less" is ironic, and may or may not be sarcastic depending on the context. Irony here refers to verbal irony, a discrepancy between the literally meaning of a phrase and its intended meaning, such as saying "What a nice day!" when it is raining. Thus, "I could give a shit" and "I couldn't give a shit" are identical in meaning, as the former is doubtless intended ironically. Similarly for caring less.
      - gojomo 15y ago
        It's a contranymic idiom. A contridiom!
    - 15y ago
notmyname 15y ago
As others have said, being open source is important because it gives you more control over your data. If you have access to the code that is storing your data, you have the option to host it yourself or pay someone else to host it with the same client. I've written about this more on my blog (http://programmerthoughts.com/openstack/democratization-of-data/ http://programmerthoughts.com/openstack/democratization-of-d...). If you are looking for an alternative to S3, I'd ask that you look at Openstack swift (http://swift.openstack.org http://swift.openstack.org). It's 100% open source, proven at scale in production, and, if you are hosting it yourself, can offer lower op-ex than using S3 (of course, there is a cap-ex cost to buy your hardware).
- dotBen 15y ago
  If you have access to the code that is storing your data, you have the option to host it yourself or pay someone else to host it with the same client. That's certainly true in 'regular' open source economics. But storage is somewhat unique in that the significant cost factor is not the price of alternative proprietary software but the hardware costs of the storage medium itself - and those are constant regardless of the license structure the software layer is using. Additionally, scales of economy come into play to such an extent that the costs of hosting this kind of storage myself will be wildly more expensive than a volume player like Amazon who operates entire datacenters (this argument goes beyond just the op-ex/cap-ex tradeoff)
rarrrrrr 15y ago
We also expect price to be a motivator, since it costs less than 1/2 of what S3 does at $0.06/GB. But we're not competing with S3 directly as a general cloud storage solution. We're specifically focusing on the case of long term archival storage. You can compare the two services as tradeoffs from the expression: Inexpensive, High Throughput, Low-Latency (pick any two.) S3 picks High Throughput and Low Latency. Nimbus.io picks Inexpensive and High Throughput. But for bulk archival and restore tasks, does 100ms of latency really matter to you? In other words, are you equally happy if your backup/restore job completes in 2 minutes vs. 2 minutes and 0.1 seconds? Do you care enough to pay more than twice as much? So that's why we're focusing on the archival market.

Egregore 15y ago

Yes, being opens source is motivation, because you can create your own cloud with your own hardware when you need it. And it's additional assurance that you'll be able to deploy your system even if they go out of business.

edanm 15y ago
Is there anyone, anywhere, who considers that as a plus? Who would actually consider rolling out their own cloud infrastructure?
- notmyname 15y ago
  Actually, many people consider it. Some are simply cautious about hosting their data with a third party. Some are prevented from using a third party for compliance or regulatory reasons. Also, it's generally more cost-effective for extremely large datasets to be self-hosted rather than hosted by a third party.
  - edanm 15y ago
    Aren't the bulk of customers who turn to the cloud rather small operations, who are trying to "outsource" as much of their infrastructure issues as possible? And aren't these customers much more concerned about pricing, rather than possible future growth? Note: I don't mean to ask this sarcastically. I'm actually asking.
    - notmyname 15y ago
      From my experience working with Rackspace Cloud Files, customer sizes are all over the map. Some customers are very small. Some are very large. I know that S3 has a similar variance in customer size. From my experience talking to users (and potential users) of Openstack (http://openstack.org http://openstack.org), there again is variance. Most people are relatively small (a few hundred GB to a few hundred TB). Some are much bigger (several PB). The most exciting thing I heard was that CERN is evaluating Openstack swift (http://swift.openstack.org http://swift.openstack.org) for their storage needs. A researcher from CERN gave a keynote at the last Openstack design summit. CERN generates 25 PB / year and has a 20 year retention policy. They have vast storage needs. The storage needs vary greatly. I've seen that outsourcing infrastructure is great to a point, but the largest users can generally get substantial cost savings by bringing their infrastructure back in house.
- mseebach 15y ago
  The cloud is great for scaling, but once you have a large dataset and more-or-less predictable growth, it could easily become more economic to handle it your self. Using something like Nimbus would make such a migration easier. On the other hand, it's not like the S3 interface is rocket-science. Re-writing your apps file-storage interaction is the least of the effort in a multi-terabyte-migration.
- asharp 15y ago
  A cloud hosting provider.
- spatten 15y ago
  A lot of Canadian companies are unable to use S3 (or EC2) due to the Patriot Act. Sure, they can get around this by using European buckets, but that kind of sucks for latency. I can easily imagine setting up a company using this software with servers in Canada using this software. So yes, it's a plus. (It's not just Canada of course, and it's not just the Patriot act. Gambling companies, for example, can't host in the US)
blackiron 15y ago
The license for server-side code - the one you would use to create your own cloud - is AGPL. Isn't this license too restrictive for business?.
- hugoroy 15y ago
  Why would it be? It's the same as the GPL, only difference is: modified version sources must be available to remote-network-interaction users. I don't see what's restrictive for business.
  - mseebach 15y ago
    If you go and sell somebody a hosting solution based on Nimbus, you'd need to share your source code. What I'm not sure of, is if you build, say, a photo sharing webapp using Nimbus as the storage back-end, does your webapp become AGPL by linking? I'm fairly certain GPL would require this, but, as per the rationale for AGPL, you don't care about that when you run a webapp. Curiously, if Nimbus adopted the exact S3 API instead of "similar to", it would not constitute linking, as it's using a standard interface.
    - justincormack 15y ago
      AGPL uses the same definition of linking as GPL so communication over a network API to a storage backend is not linking. http://www.quora.com/Does-the-AGPL-extend-the-idea-of-linking-to-include-network-access http://www.quora.com/Does-the-AGPL-extend-the-idea-of-linkin...
      - mseebach 15y ago
        Ah, thanks for that. I was under the impression that the bar for linking across the network was rather higher.
JoeAltmaier 15y ago
Its a leap that folks desiring cloud storage will want to host their own some day. I think its a little like "I want an open-source car, so when they switch back to horses, I'm ready!"
- bmelton 15y ago
  It's less like that than it is "When we're operating at a scale that makes it more affordable to own hardware than to lease, then it'd be nice if we could." The other unmentioned benefit is in scratching your own itch. If you want feature X, and Amazon won't give it to you, you can develop it in-house and host it yourself.
- jasongullickson 15y ago
  I think it's more like saying "I want a drivers license, so when I can afford a car I don't have to keep riding the bus."
rarrrrrr 15y ago
(SpiderOak / Nimbus.io cofounder here) In addition to supporting the founders personal ethics about software freedom, we feel an open source backend is important for just the sake of confidence. Some people will want to purchase the minimum of 10 machines and host a Nimbus.io storage cluster themselves (and we are also making our hardware specs open source.) Other cloud storage providers may even do this. We hope a few people will consider the hosted option, paying Nimbus.io $0.06 per GB. In any case, all of these are a win for us. We're already spending money every day to maintain a reliable storage backend for our encrypted Backup & Sync business at SpiderOak.com. Nimbus.io is an evolution from that. Community involvement here is most welcome. :) Aside from that, it's just a design we are excited to share. Every other distributed storage system I could find uses replication instead of parity. A system based on parity sacrifices latency but can deliver higher throughput on individual requests (at about 1/3 the cost.) There are use cases even outside of archival storage where this is attractive.
- hemancuso 15y ago
  I don't see how a parity based implementation can work in a meaningful way across multiple datacenters. You certainly couldn't rebuild if you lost an entire datacenter due to disaster. Replication is the only way here. So any comparison to S3 in that regard is meaningless - Nimbus can't achieve that level of durability, correct? Additionally, if you're just doing parity across multiple chassis in a single datacenter and lost a couple racks do to a power outage it would seem the network would likely shit the bed trying to rebuild, potentially bringing the whole system down. Have you guys worked through nastier failure cases that architectures like S3 can avoid?
  - rarrrrrr 15y ago
    Excellent points. Geographic redundancy with parity compliments the network topology we find in many cities: a metro area fiber ring connecting many data centers with low cost site-to-site (not internet) bandwidth. It's even lower cost to just buy excess capacity with lower QOS. Every archival storage provider I've talked to has a write-heavy workload. Write traffic maybe more than 3x read traffic. So for example in this situation replicating between two sites requires a site-to-site connection equal to the size of the incoming data. Since site-to-site connections are full-duplex, in the parity system the bandwidth for reads and writes is provided at a similar price to what would be spent on replication bandwidth for writes. That said, the first iterations of Nimbus.io won't provide geo redundancy beyond the geo-redundancy that creating an offsite backup inherently provides. We expect to add on geo redundancy storage as an upgrade option at a slightly higher price (still way under S3.) Replying to your second point: If transient conditions like only a couple racks lost power, the system wouldn't trigger an automatic rebuild right away. It would continue to service requests with parity and hinted-handoff until the machines come back online. In any case, when the system decides a full rebuild is needed, the rebuild rate is balanced with servicing new requests (similar to how a RAID controller can give tunable priority to rebuild vs. traffic.)
methodin 15y ago
Isn't that the whole point of S3 - you don't need to make your own cloud with your own hardware?

hopescope 15y ago

"I could care less if this is open source" David Mitchell explains why this phrase makes no sense and means exactly that opposite of what you want to say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw

michael_dorfman 15y ago
The phrase is usually used ironically: "I could care less" is used to mean the opposite "I couldn't care less". Similarly, when my daughter says "Nice hat, Dad", she is not actually complimenting me on my choice of haberdashery, but rather, pointing out that she thinks it is not nice at all. This message brought you by Irony: Making Communication More Interesting Since the Dawn of Language.
- verroq 15y ago
  You are talking about sarcasm. Not irony. And a commonly made grammar mistake isn't irony. Unless your whole post was wrapped in a big <sarcasm> tag and I've just made a fool out of myself.
  - michael_dorfman 15y ago
    The relationship between sarcasm and irony is subtle; sarcasm often makes use of irony, but is characterized by its "biting" nature. The quote from my daughter is ironic and sarcastic; the quote about "caring less" is ironic, and may or may not be sarcastic depending on the context. Irony here refers to verbal irony, a discrepancy between the literally meaning of a phrase and its intended meaning, such as saying "What a nice day!" when it is raining. Thus, "I could give a shit" and "I couldn't give a shit" are identical in meaning, as the former is doubtless intended ironically. Similarly for caring less.
    - gojomo 15y ago
      It's a contranymic idiom. A contridiom!
  - 15y ago

notmyname 15y ago

As others have said, being open source is important because it gives you more control over your data. If you have access to the code that is storing your data, you have the option to host it yourself or pay someone else to host it with the same client. I've written about this more on my blog (http://programmerthoughts.com/openstack/democratization-of-data/ http://programmerthoughts.com/openstack/democratization-of-d...). If you are looking for an alternative to S3, I'd ask that you look at Openstack swift (http://swift.openstack.org http://swift.openstack.org). It's 100% open source, proven at scale in production, and, if you are hosting it yourself, can offer lower op-ex than using S3 (of course, there is a cap-ex cost to buy your hardware).

dotBen 15y ago
If you have access to the code that is storing your data, you have the option to host it yourself or pay someone else to host it with the same client. That's certainly true in 'regular' open source economics. But storage is somewhat unique in that the significant cost factor is not the price of alternative proprietary software but the hardware costs of the storage medium itself - and those are constant regardless of the license structure the software layer is using. Additionally, scales of economy come into play to such an extent that the costs of hosting this kind of storage myself will be wildly more expensive than a volume player like Amazon who operates entire datacenters (this argument goes beyond just the op-ex/cap-ex tradeoff)

rarrrrrr 15y ago

We also expect price to be a motivator, since it costs less than 1/2 of what S3 does at $0.06/GB. But we're not competing with S3 directly as a general cloud storage solution. We're specifically focusing on the case of long term archival storage. You can compare the two services as tradeoffs from the expression: Inexpensive, High Throughput, Low-Latency (pick any two.) S3 picks High Throughput and Low Latency. Nimbus.io picks Inexpensive and High Throughput. But for bulk archival and restore tasks, does 100ms of latency really matter to you? In other words, are you equally happy if your backup/restore job completes in 2 minutes vs. 2 minutes and 0.1 seconds? Do you care enough to pay more than twice as much? So that's why we're focusing on the archival market.