
Wasabi – Simple storage solution - gglanzani
https://wasabi.com/product
======
knobbytires
Some quick observations:

\- Their performance claims are incredibly biased. Amazon S3 has far better
write performance than their claims.

\- They claim 100% S3 compatibility but it fails a large number of API calls
using Ceph’s s3-test. I didn’t dig into this too far but they do claim “No
need to change your S3-compatible application” so changing my endpoint +
credentials should have worked. To their credit - PUT, GET and DELETE did work
but that is only 3 of 100’s of API’s.

\- Their durability claims are highly suspect. I would want to see a white
paper breaking this down.

\- Their first round was debt financing.

Why this business model does’t work...

Most people don’t use S3 alone. S3 is a source for other AWS services. That
being said, Wasabi becomes a more expensive option as you have a 4 cent egress
fee to access data from the rest of your AWS infrastructure. The only place
Wasabi becomes cheaper is for those using S3 direct/alone which is a very
small subset of S3 usage. AWS is very open about this in white papers,
conferences, tech talks, etc.

Wasabi is an economy at scale play that cast way too far a net. There is
opportunity in specific vertical markets to sell a solution (object paired
with compute) but a pure S3 endpoint will never take substantial marketshare
away from AWS.

~~~
panarky
Yes, it's hard to find use cases where Wasabi storage could compete without
compute.

But S3 originally launched by itself, before EC2.

If Wasabi adds a Lambda-like serverless compute layer that could be powerful.

~~~
marcusr
It would be a great destination for cloud backup, where one of the concerns is
loss of all your backed up data due to malicious action - look at the trouble
the hackers had to go to in Mr Robot to take out their offsite tape backups.
I'd be more concerned though with the durability of the company rather than
their disk systems over the long term though.

~~~
wahnfrieden
Separate AWS account with write-only permission to backup S3 objects from
production pushed out to the backup account. Enable versioning and glacier in
backup account. Lock down backup account credentials appropriately. (And add
alerting and periodic fire drills of course.)

~~~
hedora
Amazon is still a single point of failure when you backup S3 to S3.

What if they deploy a silent corruption bug next year?

------
ernsheong
There's also B2 ([https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-
storage.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html)), which is I
think the cheapest of them all.

UPDATE: Well, egress is cheaper. B2 is $0.005/GB storage with $0.02/GB egress.
But one thing to consider is that B2 storage is located within one single
datacenter.

(Disclaimer: I am not affiliated, but am in the process of deciding to use
B2.)

~~~
minxomat
B2 is horribly unstable, has limits left and right and most of all, the
latency is horrendous.

You will be better off using any standard OpenStack provider. That way you
won't have a lock in, and great performance (in my testing). E.g. OpenStack
Swift on OVH.

Sure it's a tiny bit more expensive. But you get a mature cross-provider API
and better performance.

Even for huge chunks of cold data, I wouldn't want to use B2.

~~~
copperx
What are some good OpenStack providers? and are there any that can 11 nines
durability?

~~~
jzelinskie
I know at least that Rackspace has a hosted Swift storage service. Of the
storage integrations I've worked on, Swift was probably the most error-prone
to get your integration stable, though. I guess that's just a credit to the
robustness of the S3 client APIs and services that copy it (Ceph, GCS).

------
caleblloyd
From the FAQ:

> 7\. Your website indicates $.0039 per GB per month but the pricing
> comparison on the website indicates 1 TB is priced at $3.99 / month (instead
> of $3.90 / month for 1 TB). Why is that?

> The Wasabi monthly price is $.0039 GB / month. Given that there are 1024 GB
> in 1 TB (not 1000 GB), the price for 1 TB is $.0039 * 1024 or $3.99 per 1 TB
> per month.

Come on you are a digital storage company let's call things what they are.
There are 1000 GB in a TB. There are 1024 GiB in a TiB.

------
fweespeech
If the goal is price reduction:

[https://www.ovh.com/us/public-cloud/storage/object-
storage/](https://www.ovh.com/us/public-cloud/storage/object-storage/)
(S3-comparable performance)

$40/year minimum

Outgoing traffic: $0.011/GB Storage: $0.0112/month/GB

[https://www.ovh.com/us/public-cloud/storage/cloud-
archive/](https://www.ovh.com/us/public-cloud/storage/cloud-archive/)
(archival storage)

Incoming/Outgoing traffic: $0.011/GB Storage: $0.0023/month/GB

[https://www.online.net/en/c14#pricing](https://www.online.net/en/c14#pricing)
Storage: €0.005/Month

No traffic costs (because its archival storage)

The main downside is they are located in 1 physical area even tho they are
labeled as multiple DCs.

But for high traffic uses, honestly, you can just double the storage costs
(i.e. OVH CA and OVH France) to get redundancy while saving _massively_ on
traffic costs.

~~~
bedros
does this work with django storages?

~~~
fweespeech
No. It uses the OpenStack API.

[https://github.com/openstack/python-
openstacksdk](https://github.com/openstack/python-openstacksdk)

You'd need to use that to build it out.

~~~
drdaeman
Probably no need to do this on their own. Found two already existing
implementations, and suspect there are more:

[https://github.com/dennisv/django-storage-
swift](https://github.com/dennisv/django-storage-swift)

[https://django-cumulus.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://django-
cumulus.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

------
tomovo
Wouldn't it be funny if this was just a market test/exercise, using actual S3
as a backend, just to see if it gets any traction before building own HW/SW
solution?

~~~
jrs95
Kind of like how most wasabi in the U.S. isn't really wasabi, it's just
horseradish? lol

~~~
cthalupa
Not just in the US. Real wasabi is very expensive. Even in Japan, unless
you're seeing them grate it for you at the table, it's still just green
horseradish.

(Source: Posting this from Meguro-ku in Tokyo ;) )

------
mbleigh
I'm surprised the FAQ doesn't answer the question that immediately came to
mind: why should I risk my data with an untested startup when the _only_
benefit is claimed performance/price?

Or my second question: wait, doesn't this sound an awful lot like Pied Piper's
product from the newest season of Silicon Valley?

~~~
whalesalad
Exactly. Performance means nothing when the company runs out of funding and
goes belly up... along with all your data.

------
kevan
They're claiming the same 11 9s durability that S3 does. I'd be pretty
suspicious of that claim without a track record but it looks like Wasabi's
founders come from Carbonite. Bring on the competition, commoditization of
fundamental building blocks is great for everyone except people trying to make
startup-scale returns on them.

~~~
zzzcpan
Those durability numbers for both Amazon and Wasabi are pure marketing and
don't really mean anything even remotely important. Durability of data stored
by a single company, even a company like Amazon, is actually very low, you
should be scared of how low it really is. You could get kicked out from the
service, lose data because of a bug or an operational mistake, be prevented
from using the service by your government for political reasons and so on.

~~~
icedchai
Do you have any evidence for these claims of low durability? (None of those
issues, except for bugs in the service, would count against them, by the way.)

~~~
skuhn
I think factors beyond the storage algorithm are pretty important to consider
when thinking about storing data that's important to your business. To your
specific point though:

1\. Amazon claims 99.999999999% durability of objects over a year.

2\. I store 1EB of data with an object size of 4MB for a year (so
250,000,000,000 objects).

3\. I can expect to lose 250 objects in a year, or 1GB.

Now to my experience:

I have stored in excess of that amount of data in S3. I have lost considerably
more data -- solely because of data losses internal to S3 -- that these
numbers would suggest. It was a tolerable amount of data loss, I didn't curse
Amazon's name or swear vengeance, but it was definitely not 1 gig.

The standard S3 SLA provides credits only based on uptime. There is no mention
of durability whatsoever. That tells you that Amazon is not willing to put
their money where there mouth is on their 99.999999999% durability claims. The
reality is the number is a design target, not an operational guarantee.

~~~
lozenge
AFAIK, S3 only provides notification when reduced redundancy objects are lost,
not regular objects. How did you detect your data loss?

~~~
skuhn
All of my objects used standard redundancy. My recollection is that regardless
of object class, you will get a 405 error if you try to fetch an object that
has been lost.

I didn't use SNS notifications at the time (which might only work for reduced
redundancy).

So that left two options: find out when attempting to fetch the object, or run
bookkeeping jobs against the object catalog to periodically spider the data
and ferret out any objects that are lost.

The second option may be a tad nicer, but it is also more complex and more
expensive and the end result is the same either way.

------
mattl
I wonder how this compares to rsync.net, especially with their HN discount and
[http://rsync.net/products/attic.html](http://rsync.net/products/attic.html)
if you're doing the kind of backups I'd imagine Glacier is used for.

~~~
stevekemp
After reading about [https://rsync.net](https://rsync.net) for years on this
site, I signed up last week. Great service, and almost pain-free. I've only
bought 100Gb but that's enough for my virtual machines.

(Completely replaced the use of [https://rsync.io](https://rsync.io) ;)

~~~
mattl
You should make rsync.io redirect to rsync.net with your coupon code and get a
bunch of storage :)

------
prirun
They have a gimmick in their pricing: 90-day minimum storage. So for objects
that don't have 90-day lifetimes, you can end up paying WAY more than S3.

S3 IA has a 30-day minimum, like Google Nearline, and Google Coldline is
90-day minimum. These make it very hard to predict and control pricing.

Backblaze B2 may not be as high performance, but their pricing is very low AND
very predictable. No gimmicks. I've received many HashBackup customer emails
mentioning that they use B2 and have never received complaints about their
service.

------
cschmidt
> Wasabi storage costs a flat $.0039/GB/Month with a 1 TB minimum usage.

so the only "catch" is $3.90 a month minimum?

~~~
psz
Not only. There is also minimum 90-day charge for objects.
[https://wasabi.com/pricing/pricing-faqs/](https://wasabi.com/pricing/pricing-
faqs/)

~~~
cschmidt
According to that, there is an extra "9" they didn't show, so $3.99 rather
than $3.90.

So then if you deleted your 1TB each month, and uploaded new data, you'd be
paying 3 times more due to the 90 day minimum charge, so about $12/month in
the worst case.

~~~
klodolph
That is to be expected for bottom-barrel prices, to make up for the cost of
maintenance (GC / compaction / rebalancing / etc of data). They might just
wait 90 days before doing the first compaction, or whatever their system does
to delete data.

------
sjbase
Has anyone here done a migration from S3 to Wasabi, and successfully realized
the lower total cost Wasabi is claiming?

------
throwaway2016a
> Wasabi is built to be 100% AWS S3 bit-compatible (same AWS API constructs
> for storage & identity management). No need to change your S3-compatible
> application when using Wasabi

I often wonder how this works. With the whole Sun lawsuit with Google over the
Java API making a clone of another platforms API sounds dangerous.

I'm curious what HN thinks.

I've wanted to have a "compatibility layer" that mimics my competitors APIs
but have been scared of the possible repercussions.

~~~
pella
Minio also has a S3 "compatibility layer"

see: [https://minio.io/](https://minio.io/) "implements Amazon S3 v4 APIs.
Minio also includes client SDKs and a console utility."

~~~
the_common_man
[http://pithos.io/](http://pithos.io/)

------
ricardobeat
Lacking comparison with their closest competitor B2 ($0.005/GB, cheaper
outbound at $0.02/GB). Also no information on DC location and zones.

~~~
copperx
They claim to have multiple data centers. It sounds fishy to me. I would like
to see some pics / info af their setup before I trust them with 1 byte of my
data.

~~~
jjeaff
My guess is that their data centers look exactly like this

[https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-
infrastructure/](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/)

------
jakozaur
Storage is cheap on any cloud, the network egress is expensive.

1\. Wasabi: Storage: $.0039/GB/Month Egress: $.04/GB

2\. AWS: Storage: $0.023/GB/Month Egress: $.05-.09/GB (even lower if you're
big)

Sending data one outside of AWS costs equivalent of 2-4 months of storage.

~~~
matt_wulfeck
The benefit of S3 is that traffic is free within the same region. If you're
hosting on AWS that alone is going to save you money versus the competitors.

~~~
IanCal
A less seen cost is for the various operations.

Regularly pushing lots of small files on S3 can get expensive. $1/200k files
($0.005 per 1k PUT requests).

~~~
copperx
Not to mention the minimum file size charge, which I think was a few kb per
file in infrequent access S3.

~~~
ascendantlogic
IA is only applicable for items that are 128kb or larger in size. Also Glacier
adds 32kb of glacier data to each object as well as 8kb of standard tier
storage per object. S3 is really inefficient for huge numbers of small files.

------
rdtsc
LeoFS: A stable and scalable S3 clone with NFS support?

That you can host on your own infrastructure

[https://leo-project.net/leofs/](https://leo-project.net/leofs/)

~~~
rdtsc
Well they edited the title so this isn't as tongue and cheek as it was meant
to be. The original title was something like:

"Wasabi - a faster, better clone of S3?"

That's why I see others quote the original in the reply.

------
gglanzani
Not affiliated, by just found out that's compatible with Arq and when I saw
the prices I was stunned.

~~~
sdotsen
Same here though I'm leaning towards backblaze since there's no minimum.

------
bzz01
75MB/5 sec benchmark results (using internal AWS network to pull from S3!)
sound dubious. You can get 4Gbps+ down from S3 within the same region in my
experience, that's 30x faster than these numbers.

------
reiichiroh
On the same page on HN there's another Wasabi that's a fire alarm for deaf
people.

~~~
toyg
And I'm old enough to remember Wasabi as the proprietary vb-to-php compiler
that FogCreek developed for a few years. And I think there was something
related to OpenBSD or NetBSD, some company called Wasabi System...?

It's definitely one of the most common codenames in IT, together with Phoenix,
Firebird and Panda (and in the enterprise, all greek/roman gods).

~~~
bch
NetBSD, and also storage related[0], confusingly enough. Wasabi brought
journaling (WAPBL[1]) to NetBSD.

[0] [http://www.wasabisystems.com/](http://www.wasabisystems.com/)

[1] [http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?wapbl++NetBSD-
current](http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?wapbl++NetBSD-current)

------
loisaidasam
This looks great. Are there any client libraries for access, perhaps similar
to AWS's `boto`? Having a hard time finding that on your website ..

~~~
dividuum
Since it claims to be "100% bit compatible with Amazon S3", I would assume
that you can use boto if you manually configure their endpoints.

~~~
loisaidasam
Would be nice to see a note about that somewhere

~~~
WasabiRichard
This is Richard: a product manager at Wasabi. Yes we work with the boto SDK.

you can find all of the tested compatibility our PACT team has done here:
[https://wasabi.com/help/interop-results/](https://wasabi.com/help/interop-
results/)

------
yuvadam
Depending on your access patterns, Backblaze B2 might be cheaper at $0.005/GB
stored and $0.02/GB downloaded.

------
jasonsync
Curious .. where (region) is the data stored?

~~~
WasabiRichard
This is Richard: a product manager with Wasabi

Presently our main data centers are in Massachussetts (home sweet home) and
Virginia (similar to that of AWS east). Having our data located here has
advantages in the present cloud ecosystem that we are excited to roll our in
the months to come.

------
tarikozket
Neat job, keep up the great work! There is also OVH as competitor. Their panel
and documentation is not the best but once you integrate, it works like a
charm and I guess they are the cheapest object storage service out there in
the market: [https://www.ovh.com/us/public-cloud/storage/object-
storage/](https://www.ovh.com/us/public-cloud/storage/object-storage/)

~~~
jjeaff
Why would you say they are the cheapest object storage when it is
significantly more than the very service you responded to?

Not to mention b2 and several others that are cheaper.

------
jdwyah
Worth noting the opportunity cost of not being in S3. Something like Athena
won't be yours for the asking. It's been saving my butt lately. Nice to be
able to actually see what's in your S3 sometimes :)
[http://blog.ratelim.it/blog/log-aggregation-at-scale-for-
che...](http://blog.ratelim.it/blog/log-aggregation-at-scale-for-cheap-with-
aws-athena-and-kinesis-firehose)

------
thoughtpalette
Would love to hear from someones perspective whom actually moved current
infrastructure over to this provider. Would love a write-up and pros-cons
after transitioning.

------
squid3
There is also NodeChef object storage. NodeChef charges only by the storage
size of your instance. No Data transfer charges. No additional charges for
PUT, GET, COPY, or other operations. [https://www.nodechef.com/s3-compatible-
object-storage](https://www.nodechef.com/s3-compatible-object-storage)

------
bogomipz
The article states:

"Wasabi’s durability is 11 x 9s, the same as Amazon S3. To put that in
context, if you stored 1 million 1 GB files in Wasabi, you would expect on
average to lose one file every 659,000 years"

Can someone walk me through the math here? I specifically curious about why
the size of the file being 1 GB is relevant to the calculation.

~~~
CobrastanJorji
It doesn't matter. This is marketing fluff. What companies like Amazon do is
count how many hard drives would need to simultaneously fail to lose data,
calculate the odds of a hard drive losing data, and then multiplying. This
gets you to 11 9's.

In practice, this is almost certainly not going to be why you lose data. That
will be because of a chain of human errors, or a code bug, or because the user
accidentally deleted the data, or because earthquakes destroyed your data
centers.

I don't know anything about Wasabi other than what's on their web page, but I
half suspect that what they did was look at Amazon's durability guarantee and
then write that number down as their durability guarantee.

~~~
jjeaff
Yes, I think is disingenuous to call it "data" durability. "disk" durability
would be more accurate.

------
mv4
I am curious what their strategy is.

Cloud storage by itself (just like delivery) is a commodity, and if you look
at the pricing trends per GB, it's a race to the bottom (will be interesting
to see which CDN decides to become "free" first).

So, without a suite of offerings a la AWS - how will they make money in this
market?

~~~
WasabiRichard
This is Richard: a product manager with Wasabi

We agree with you exactly: storage should be a commodity. The goal of making
something like Wasabi is to be able to do cloud storage of datasets that were
too large to be financially feasible before. Allowing data on the Petabyte and
Exabyte scale to be easily accessible between institutions could be
revolutionary and we are excited to be on the forefront.

~~~
mv4
Thank you.

------
mingabunga
Just came here to say I think the design of the website looks great, colors,
spacing, type etc.

------
foofoofoofoofoo
For me, when choosing an object storage service, the most important question
is WHERE is my data is stored. If I cannot choose where my data is stored, I
won't use the service. Why? Because my clients will ask me the same question
for their audits.

------
sreitshamer
We just added Wasabi as a destination option in Arq Backup. Seems to do that
job well.

------
inertial
> 12\. How reliable is Wasabi?

> The Wasabi infrastructure has been built using industry best practices for
> redundancy in data center design.

Sounds too generic. Maybe put in something concrete & technical.

------
ProAm
Isn't Wasabi a programming language from Fog Creek Software?

~~~
sp332
It was an in-house compiler that they're not using anymore.
[https://blog.fogcreek.com/killing-off-wasabi-
part-1/](https://blog.fogcreek.com/killing-off-wasabi-part-1/)

------
ComputerGuru
Does anyone have a suggestion for a cheaper CloudFront, not S3?

Preferably an option that can do S3 upstream, and support for signed requests
with expiry is a must.

~~~
throwaway2016a
I know this doesn't add value but if you think CloudFront is expensive you
should see how much CDNs used to cost before CloudFront came around. The fact
it doesn't change you for the bandwidth between S3 and CloudFront is key too.

Try pricing it against Google
[https://cloud.google.com/cdn/pricing](https://cloud.google.com/cdn/pricing)
and Level3 [http://www.level3.com/en/products/content-delivery-
network/](http://www.level3.com/en/products/content-delivery-network/)

As someone mentioned, CloudFlare initial seems cheaper but you give up some
stuff like control of your DNS and they can shut you off or start showing
CAPTCHAs at any time unless you pay for their higher plans. Which might be
worth it, you have to weight the pros and cons.

~~~
foobarbazetc
CloudFront is one of the slowest CDNs out there.

CloudFlare is okay as long as you pay $200/month. That's nothing in the CDN
world. Amazon wants $600/month just to deploy a SSL cert on CloudFront.

~~~
throwaway2016a
> Amazon wants $600/month just to deploy a SSL cert on CloudFront

That's a bit misleading Amazon SSL is free on CloudFront if you are OK with
SNI. And almost every is now... browsers without SNI are virtually none. The
only browser with any market use that does not support it is IE 8 on Windows
XP!

------
Waterluvian
Am I doing the math wrong or is this $4/mo for me to dump 1TB of copies of my
family albums and whatnot into for long term cold storage?

~~~
PhantomGremlin
Can you make do with storing only 50 GB? That's $0.99/month from Apple. Can
you make do with storing only 200 GB? That's $2.99/month from Apple.

No extra charge to get your data out.

The point is that for individuals it might make more sense to consider
"friendlier" storage options. These types of services don't seem to be
tailored to storing "family albums".

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238](https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT201238)

~~~
copperx
Agreed. But I wouldn't trust Apple with my data; iCloud has lost some of my
iWork files and has failed to sync important Apple Notes when changing phones.
This was during the start of iCloud, so reliability might be better now.

------
demas1252
If I am using Arq, will I have additional costs except '$.0039 per GB per
month'?

------
PaulRobinson
The biggest reason why I use S3 is not price or performance. Competing with
them on price or performance is not going to work.

I use S3 because of convenience. Build something more convenient, I'll switch.

~~~
jjeaff
If it is an S3 API clone, doesn't that make it equally convenient?

------
dutchbrit
What payment methods do they accept?

~~~
WasabiRichard
This is Richard: a product manager with Wasabi

Presently we accept all credit cards (via stripe of course), and are rolling
out invoices for ACH / etc soon.

------
freedomben
Is there a web UI?

------
Piccollo
BUT WHERE IS THE SUSHI?

------
CobrastanJorji
CTRL+F "availability". 0 results found.

