
The Cloud’s Software: A Look Inside Backblaze - ingve
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-clouds-software-a-look-inside-backblaze/
======
moondev
The fact that the entire infrastructure of backblaze exists in a single
building is a little worrying.

Are there any plans to expand to other datacenters? What happens if there is a
disaster there? Is everything gone? Does backblaze backup it's own data?

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> Yes we do plan on expanding to more datacenters,
and we do have emergency plans in place, though we do choose our datacenters
carefully to make sure that we avoid any natural-disaster prone areas. As for
backing up our own data - we certainly do make backups of our core
info/necessary data. As for the user data that we store, that's backed up
across the storage pods in a vault as discussed in that post. We do not
replicate customer data across multiple datacenters. At our price-point,
that's just not feasible.

~~~
click170
Is there thought being given to expose such an option to the end user at
additional cost?

Say if I wanted to make sure my data was stored in 2 regions, and was OK with
a slight increase in cost to accomplish that.

~~~
atYevP
Sure, we consider it every now and again but for now we like "clean" pricing -
meaning that it's the same across the board. Of course that might change in
the future, but we try to strive for simplicity, so having different "tiers"
goes somewhat counter to what we've done thus far.

~~~
Bromlife
Long time BackBlaze user & fan here. Currently backing up three computers.
Love your service.

However, for my main dev computer, I would totally pay another $5USD to
replicate it to another location. I don't think that needs to complicate the
pricing that much. You're essentially just paying for another backup, except
it's the same computer in a different location.

Another question, any plans for coming to Linux?

~~~
atYevP
Hey there! Thanks for using us :D Icefo is correct, we don't currently have
plans for Linux support - but we do have Backblaze B2. While not unlimited, it
gives a lot more flexibility, and may end up being less expensive, depending
on how much data you're storing -> backblaze.com/b2

------
3pt14159
I must say, I started using Blackblaze's S3 competitor, B2, just this week and
I'm very impressed. The API is easy to understand, but robust enough to handle
hard edge cases, and the interface is quite easy to understand and well
designed. The sample code provided works without a long chain of dependencies
and it's overall felt like it's working _with_ me rather than having to fight
it to do what I want.

Too early to speak to the uptime or support, but I'm pretty optimistic given
what I've seen thus far.

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> Great to hear, glad you're enjoying it! Hopefully
you won't need to use support too much :D

------
touchofevil
I love that backblaze has added the ability to back up a server or NAS for $5
per TB per month. I just convinced my friend at a media company to replicate
their 30TB backup server offsite to Backblaze and the cost is only $150 per
month. That's just crazy cheap compared to colo-ing your own offsite server
and drives.

~~~
Bombthecat
Why not Amazon drive?

------
aairey
BackBlaze, I really love their yearly Hard Drive Failure Reports.

[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-benchmark-
stats-20...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-benchmark-stats-2016/)

Each time a very thorough post with good set of data to generate statistics
from.

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> Glad you like it! I'll keep giving the writers
compliments, they love those things :D

------
monksy
This looks like it would be very interesting to use this as a backup for all
of my machines. Does backblaze have an Rsync compatible endpoint?

I use Linux on all of my machines, so I couldn't use the personal backup setup
that they have.

~~~
kejaed
While I'd obviously listen to Yev first over me, I was also looking into my
options for B2 from Linux today and found rclone that looks nice:

[http://rclone.org/b2/](http://rclone.org/b2/)

~~~
atYevP
> While I'd obviously listen to Yev first over me

LOL, that is NOT the prevailing wisdom around the office :P We do have an
integrations page, I just pulled the first one I could think of. More info
here ->
[https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html)

------
click170
Excellent read, thank you for sharing!

Just curious, was there any consideration given to existing storage solutions
like Ceph when you were evaluating writing your own erasure encoding system?

It seems like it may have been a potential good fit at one point in time, and
might have made it easier to expose an S3-like API if you wanted to down the
road.

~~~
atYevP
> S3-like API if you wanted to down the road.

We already have -> [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-
storage.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html)! Vaults was one
of the reasons why we could build out ourB2 Cloud Storage service. We
considered a lot of of options, but rolling our own fit with our culture :)

~~~
Veratyr
I think by "S3-like API", OP likely meant an actual S3-compatible API such as
that provided by other competitors (off the top of my head, Google Cloud
Storage).

~~~
atYevP
Ah - that makes sense. Our devs are always looking at ways to make us more
viable for folks - so they are aware :D

------
yazr
How do you handle the JVM pauses due to GC and jit kicking in? Or are you just
able to accept some milli sec delay every so often ?

I work on very-low-latency products (sub-sub-msec) and we have only been able
to mitigate this, never fully solve it.

