
Backblaze Announces B2 Compute Partnerships - willcodeforfoo
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/introducing-cloud-compute-services/
======
nolok
I see people from Blackblaze here, so let me ask: any chance we could get B2
integration in Synology's Hyper Backup ?

I know you're in Cloud Sync, but that's really not the same thing (a one/two
way sync is not a backup service).

I'm not sure if you need to give Synology a nudge or something, and I would
even pay a fee for it if need be, but until then I can't use B2 as one my main
backup destination for all those businesses NAS I have at various small sized
companies I administrate.

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> We'd LOVE for that to happen (and there's ways to
make Cloud Sync work as a one-way street) but it looks like they are pushing
their own C2 service for Hyper Backup - so it's looking unlikely that they'll
add us in. There's a thread about it on their forums
([https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=120647](https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=120647))
so our hope is that if they see value in adding 3rd party platforms to the
Hyper Backup service we'd be high on the list!

~~~
nolok
> and there's ways to make Cloud Sync work as a one-way street

Sadly it still means if the source gets corrupted for whatever reason the
backup is done, for business files sync is really not backup (I don't think
I'm teaching you anything there, but really this sadly doesn't fit my needs at
all). Also Hyper Vault is all about the intelligent versionning.

While it's possible to trick it by doing the backup somewhere and then syncing
THAT to B2 (and I do it for my personnal NAS), it's too much of a hassle and
"complex" setup that I can't see myself pushing that to my customers.

OVH managed to get them to add HubiC in there so clearly there is a way. Hope
you will keep pushing them until they move on it ! And thanks for making such
a great product :)

~~~
fnord123
>for business files sync is really not backup

With versioning it is.

~~~
nolok
It really isn't. Maybe I'm mistaken and then I'm listening to how you do it ?

The purpose of file syncing and backuping is very different, one is ensuring
that a change on the source is replicated to the destination and is kept up to
date on changes, the other is taking a snapshot frozen in time no matter what
happens on the source.

~~~
fnord123
If you have a file version, it's frozen in time. So if you have syncing with
file versions you can rollback files individually.

~~~
nolok
I don't think I was clear enough: with a two way sync, if a disgruntled
employee / script failure / any other thing destroys the file version 1.0, it
gets uploaded and replace the old file version 1.0

Backup is not just about having a copy, it's having a copy that stops being
kept in sync with the original after it is made.

~~~
fnord123
The version (in S3) is a hash of the data so if you remove your local version
and replace it then you won't be tricked into thinking version 1.0 is the
wrong thing (unless someone brute forces a new file with the same hash).

There is also a concept of Write Once Read Many in storage which is used for
compliance. So you can use sync with WORM and it's basically append only.

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budmang
We're thrilled about this. In short, we've directly connected our storage and
their compute to ensure fast connections, and made the data transfers free.
We've heard some ways people want to use this (disaster recovery, transcoding,
rendering) - but would love to hear ways that you might. Thank you!

Gleb from Backblaze

~~~
toomuchtodo
Hey Gleb! This is awesome!

Are there plans to accelerate this as an offering for other providers? I think
there's huge benefit in partnering with other providers where you're enabling
an agnostic storage layer (any provider that needs a durable object storage
system without the complexity of operationalizing one themselves). Congrats,
huge Backblaze fan!

~~~
budmang
Thanks for the kudos. We're open to supporting other providers as well,
including other types of services beyond compute (e.g. databases and specific
verticals.)

Do you have some specific providers you were interested in having connected?

~~~
codingminds
When your European region exists: I'd love to see Hetzner(.com) connected.

~~~
budmang
Looks like they're in Germany/Finland. We'll try.

~~~
chx
Be still my beating heart. Seriously? I would drop my Hetzner storage boxes in
a heartbeat if I could connect to you instead on a fast link. I have, through
the years, have used their auctions to snatch quite a few SSD only boxes and
so I need external mass storage their network storage offer is ... ahem ...
not the fastest! I would welcome something better :)

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menegattig
Backblaze B2 is awesome and the future looks very promising. Their team is
also very open to new ideas and projects.

We have few PB of data there and never had any problem.

I honestly don't see any reason for anyone to use AWS or Google Cloud for
object storage, except for the outbound network transfer issue from these
providers.

~~~
dna_polymerase
Redundancy? BackBlaze still only operates one (or two but in the same region)
datacenters.

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> we actually have datacenters in California and
Arizona so they aren't too close together! That said, we're also working on
multi-region support so that you could move data between regions (no ETA on
that yet). Hoping to get more datacenters online in the coming year!

But you're correct - we do recommend diversification, having data in multiple
locations is always a best practice, and if you can have it in different
vedors, all the better!

~~~
discodave
Will my data in BackBlaze get replicated to two separate buildings
automatically? Or do I have to pay to store it in both California and Arizona?

S3 always stores your data in at least 3 availability zones, for instance.

~~~
atYevP
We're still working on the spec so hard to say, though even if we did make you
pay for it you could store it in 4 regions before hitting S3 pricing :) That
said, we try to be fair in most things we do.

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bburhans
If Backblaze added simple, cheap functions-as-a-service, I'd switch everything
away from the Big Three cloud providers and Auth0 except for fallback
microservices. The biggest reason is bandwidth costs, which are
disproportionately huge for small and medium businesses if there are more than
a couple kilobytes of transfer per invocation.

That said, I am not super impressed by these first two compute providers, and
probably would not trust them to give me enough nines even if they started
doing FaaS. I can spin up something similar with Kubernetes on Hetzner for
considerably less money...

~~~
budmang
Which functions are you using?

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jedberg
Wow nice! They figured out a way to successfully compete with Amazon by slowly
backing into little corners of their space. Love it!

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze -> We're just over here doing our own little thing hoping
folks join in on the fun :)

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lewis1028282
Can the people from Backblaze answer when they are going to accept payement in
different currencies? My Backblaze bill is around $0.50 but my bank charges
fees for conversion etc so the total paid is often around £2.50 or so. Would
love if they’d accept bitcoin or Paypal/Amazon or charge British pounds.

~~~
brianwski
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> currency conversion is expensive

Backblaze probably won't accept other currencies in 2018. However, we
definitely have heard about this issue, and we have a feature in the works to
allow you to "load up" your account with an arbitrary amount of pre-paid cash
so that you pay ONE transaction fee to deposit (as an example) £250 pounds at
once (incurring the £2.50 conversion fee exactly once) and then as Backblaze
deducts from this account balance instead of a credit card there are zero
transaction fees.

Would that help?

The OTHER reason this is a requested feature is some customers want a "reserve
fund" to be used if their Credit Card payment fails, as a hedge against
Backblaze deleting their data for lack of payment.

~~~
kemonocode
> However, we definitely have heard about this issue, and we have a feature in
> the works to allow you to "load up" your account with an arbitrary amount of
> pre-paid cash

At last. I actually did abandon B2 over DO's Spaces due to the lack of this
feature, despite the far more competitive pricing on your end. That, and the
lack of AWS API support, but that was mostly related to my particular use
case, which was the need to mount cloud storage as disk partitions using s3ql
which mainly supports AWS, OpenStack and compatible services. It does have
preliminary B2 support [0] but it was really hacky and I ended up losing data
because of it.

Having a prepaid credit option and the option to use PayPal for such payments
like DO does would have tipped me towards Backblaze's favor to the point of
trying to fix s3ql's B2 support, though. ;)

[0]
[https://hub.docker.com/r/zdce/s3ql-b2/](https://hub.docker.com/r/zdce/s3ql-b2/)

~~~
daviesliu
JuiceFS [1] could be a replacement for S3QL, which has better support for B2,
can also be mounted on multiple machines in the same time.

If you don't have more than 1TiB, JuiceFS is totally free.

Disclaimer: Founder of JuiceFS here.

~~~
nilayp
Nilay from Backblaze here. This is awesome! Can you reach out to us via this
form? I'd love to learn more about your software and list it on our website.
Just mention I sent you here: [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/contact-
sales.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/contact-sales.html)

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eropple
B2 is interesting, and the price for object storage is pretty competitive. I
wrote my stuff against S3's API, particularly for DO Spaces, but DO's fairly
epic pants-crapping this week has me nervous.

My use case is download-heavy, though, and a little bit bursty (but with a
long tail, a CDN doesn't really address my needs); what sort of bandwidth
speeds can I expect from downloading B2 when a decent number of clients, let's
say 100-500, are hitting a single object concurrently?

~~~
bzElliott
Sysadmin at Backblaze here. Unless it's closer to 500+ and they all have
100Mbps+ connections, the clients will definitely be the bottleneck. Even in
that case with smallish objects, it's unlikely that the TCP window will ramp
up enough to put a dent in things. That number will of course continue going
up with time as we expand and improve the infrastructure.

~~~
eropple
That's pretty awesome. Depending on how my DO Spaces tests go, I very much
might try it out; it's a bummer that you guys don't support S3API, but I can
deal with that. (I know Minio has a layer for B2, but I'd rather not go that
way.)

Anyway, thanks a lot!

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_Soulou
Is there any plan for a European presence? (At least, for the storage part)

~~~
budmang
Does it matter where in Europe for you? And curious which of the various
reasons does a European presence matter to you most?

~~~
alexkon
Perhaps somewhere close to AMS-IX? For me, that would be network latency to
non-US customers.

~~~
budmang
Thanks - definitely looking near there.

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e12e
Was anyone able to figure out what bandwidth/data is included with the
packet.net "tiny"? It's roughly 50 usd/month and lists dual 1gps uplink - but
I couldn't see anything about bandwidth. Eg hetzner will include ~30tb/month
with a gbps uplink - or roughly 45 gb/hour or 100 mbps sustained.

Given the other prices packet.net lists for bandwidth (Starting at 0.05/gb) i
assume it's _not_ unmetered (that's about 300 tb for 1 gbps for a month).

~~~
Rafuino
Hmmm, I've found their Slack channel to be a good spot to ask Qs and get
answers relatively quickly.

[https://slack.packet.net/](https://slack.packet.net/)

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smoyer
Packet wants me to contact them for a quote? I like BackBlaze's transparent
pricing but won't be pairing Packet's compute service with it. Sorry.

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze -> that's very interesting! What was your workflow to have
them request a contact for a quote? One of the things I really liked about
them was that their website is similar to ours in that it's easy to see what
everything is - so very interested to hear!

~~~
smoyer
Wow ... mea culpa and apologies!

I appear to have taken some weird path through the top-level "Product" menu -
I'd love to say that the "Pricing" link wasn't immediately to the left of the
"Product" link but at this point I'm going to have to simply claim insanity.
Now that you've all steered the raving lunatic to the very transparent
pricing, I'll shut up and try to find a project to justify bare-metal.

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Nullabillity
Why single out these two providers? Shared parent company? Are they paying out
of some marketing budget? Cheaper peering for some reason?

~~~
brianwski
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> why single out these two providers?

They are the first two. We are very open to more!

> Shared parent company?

Backblaze is owned by employees. 100% of the board of directors work at the
company every day. We have no parent company. :-)

> Cheaper peering for some reason?

Yes. We made sure any candidate partner has a direct cross connect with our
locations and the data goes over pipes we own so our costs are "fixed". After
you own/lease the fiber line the bandwidth is "mostly" free inside of it. I
say "mostly" because we still have to pay a tiny amount for each network port
on each end, some electricity, etc. But it's negligible compared to paying for
bandwidth at market rates.

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manigandham
This is great news, looks very interesting for data warehouse scenarios now
with something like Spark or Drill. Are there any specs on throughput
available to compute on Packet?

Side note: never heard of SlicingDice before but their website doesn't seem to
be working, getting a cloudflare site offline page.

~~~
budmang
Agree - would love to connect some data warehouse services. (Seems Spark &
Drill are not hosted, but a customer could run those in a compute provider.)

SlicingDice worked for me. Are you still getting an offline page?

~~~
manigandham
Still doesnt work:
[https://i.imgur.com/g6HMbkA.png](https://i.imgur.com/g6HMbkA.png)

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baybal2
Still can't beat a place in colo with few own transcode servers with FPGAs or
transcoding asics.

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byefruit
What kind of performance are people seeing against B2?

I wonder how realistic running analytics over stored data is.

~~~
budmang
B2 is object storage. Similar to any object storage you generally want to use
it for storing the data, not running heavy analytics directly on it. Usually
you'd want to move the data to the directly attached block storage (which our
compute partners offer) to run the actual analysis.

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byranthector
Yes! Bare metal power and Backblaze affordability! I so need this!

~~~
budmang
Hey Byran - what do you hope to do with it?

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biasforaction
I've been a big fan of Backblaze for several years now. I'll make sure to stop
by your booth at NAB and express my nerdy appreciation for your service.

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze -> please stop by! :D

