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Yes please. I was also intrigued by this statement. I was under the impression that Amazon never told what the "secret sauce" was behind Glacier. Looking at Wik

Yes please. I was also intrigued by this statement. I was under the impression that Amazon never told what the "secret sauce" was behind Glacier. Looking at Wikipedia now, it seems there are still multiple contending theories. Also, is it true that the service is not very popular? Are people here using it or similar?

takasc2 11y ago
Everyone knows it is not very popular - the limitations are extreme so you have to have a very specific use case for it.
JimmaDaRustla 11y ago
I'm using it for incremental backups of my photo collection. If I ever need to restore my entire collection, its available on S3/Glacier.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
kstrauser 11y ago
My home Synology unit does nightly backups to Glacier. It'd be terrible to lose our house to natural disaster, but losing all our digital data (photos, records, etc.) would make it just that much worse. For about $10 a month, I know I can recover all that stuff even if we lose everything else.
teraflop 11y ago
The big sticking point with Glacier is that the cost model for retrievals is complicated and unintuitive. There's a two-step process where you have to first retrieve data and then download it, and you're billed based on the peak retrieval rate in a month, not the total amount downloaded. It's not so bad now that they let you set a retrieval policy to limit your throughput, but before that, you had to carefully schedule your retrievals in order to avoid unexpected costs. As far as I can tell, Google's new nearline storage offering is superior to Glacier in nearly every way. The retrieval is much faster, and the retrieval costs are a flat rate per gigabyte that's equal to what Glacier gives you in the best case. Only drawback is the lack of a free tier.
- discodave 11y ago
  You're not wrong, but if you look at the problem that Glacier is trying to solve then it doesn't look so bad: 1. Glacier is competing with tape. So for potential customers, if it's easier to acquire and maintain than your own tape library then that's a win. 2. In the words of James Hamilton the use case for Glacier is referred "jokingly to as Write Only Storage". If you're using Glacier for disaster recovery then paying a one time cost to retrieve a bunch of data pales in in comparison to the potential costs of not being able to recover your data. 3. Is nearline actually superior for the case of "oh shit I need to retrieve everything right now"? 4. AWS already has this cloud storage thingy called S3 and it has reduced redundancy storage if you're looking for something slightly cheaper. http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2012/08/glacier-engineering-for-cold-data-storage-in-the-cloud/ http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2012/08/glacier-engineering...
  - teraflop 11y ago
    I guess you've got a good point as far as #3 goes; the analysis is actually more interesting than I thought it was. Both Google's nearline storage and Glacier scale your retrieval capabilities proportionally to how much data you have stored with them. You can express it as a tradeoff between cost/GB and the time taken to retrieve your entire dataset Google throttles your downloads to a fixed rate, so they're effectively forcing you to one point in that space: (3 days, $0.01/GB). With Glacier, you get a curve depending on how fast you want it. It's much more expensive at the same speed (3 days, $0.10/GB) but you can go to one extreme of getting all your data for free over the course of 20 months, or getting it all within 4 hours for about $1.80/GB. So I guess it's fair to say that Glacier gives you more flexibility, but Google's offering is a much better value at the particular point that it optimizes for.
    - Dylan16807 11y ago
      Honestly it's hard for me to imagine a total emergency restore-EVERYTHING situation that needs the data in under a day. If it's not that much data you should have a local copy anyway. If it's massive amounts of data is your connection even that fast? And how did you wipe 50 servers at once?

takasc2 11y ago

Everyone knows it is not very popular - the limitations are extreme so you have to have a very specific use case for it.

JimmaDaRustla 11y ago

I'm using it for incremental backups of my photo collection. If I ever need to restore my entire collection, its available on S3/Glacier.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

kstrauser 11y ago

My home Synology unit does nightly backups to Glacier. It'd be terrible to lose our house to natural disaster, but losing all our digital data (photos, records, etc.) would make it just that much worse. For about $10 a month, I know I can recover all that stuff even if we lose everything else.

teraflop 11y ago

The big sticking point with Glacier is that the cost model for retrievals is complicated and unintuitive. There's a two-step process where you have to first retrieve data and then download it, and you're billed based on the peak retrieval rate in a month, not the total amount downloaded. It's not so bad now that they let you set a retrieval policy to limit your throughput, but before that, you had to carefully schedule your retrievals in order to avoid unexpected costs. As far as I can tell, Google's new nearline storage offering is superior to Glacier in nearly every way. The retrieval is much faster, and the retrieval costs are a flat rate per gigabyte that's equal to what Glacier gives you in the best case. Only drawback is the lack of a free tier.

discodave 11y ago
You're not wrong, but if you look at the problem that Glacier is trying to solve then it doesn't look so bad: 1. Glacier is competing with tape. So for potential customers, if it's easier to acquire and maintain than your own tape library then that's a win. 2. In the words of James Hamilton the use case for Glacier is referred "jokingly to as Write Only Storage". If you're using Glacier for disaster recovery then paying a one time cost to retrieve a bunch of data pales in in comparison to the potential costs of not being able to recover your data. 3. Is nearline actually superior for the case of "oh shit I need to retrieve everything right now"? 4. AWS already has this cloud storage thingy called S3 and it has reduced redundancy storage if you're looking for something slightly cheaper. http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2012/08/glacier-engineering-for-cold-data-storage-in-the-cloud/ http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2012/08/glacier-engineering...
- teraflop 11y ago
  I guess you've got a good point as far as #3 goes; the analysis is actually more interesting than I thought it was. Both Google's nearline storage and Glacier scale your retrieval capabilities proportionally to how much data you have stored with them. You can express it as a tradeoff between cost/GB and the time taken to retrieve your entire dataset Google throttles your downloads to a fixed rate, so they're effectively forcing you to one point in that space: (3 days, $0.01/GB). With Glacier, you get a curve depending on how fast you want it. It's much more expensive at the same speed (3 days, $0.10/GB) but you can go to one extreme of getting all your data for free over the course of 20 months, or getting it all within 4 hours for about $1.80/GB. So I guess it's fair to say that Glacier gives you more flexibility, but Google's offering is a much better value at the particular point that it optimizes for.
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    Honestly it's hard for me to imagine a total emergency restore-EVERYTHING situation that needs the data in under a day. If it's not that much data you should have a local copy anyway. If it's massive amounts of data is your connection even that fast? And how did you wipe 50 servers at once?