
Spaces: Scalable Object Storage on DigitalOcean - beardicus
https://blog.digitalocean.com/introducing-spaces-object-storage/
======
tombrossman
Using AWS's simple calculator[0] for S3, I get a figure of $97.82 for 250GB
storage and 1TB data transfer out per month. DO's price is $5. I know AWS is
considered more expensive but that's a huge difference - is my calculation
wrong here?

[0][http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html](http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html)

~~~
joshribakoff
Yes Digital Ocean / Linode bandwidth is 40x cheaper than AWS. Amazon also
charges extra for a support plan so you can open a ticket, and inform them of
their bugs. And we have found bugs in AWS infrastructure that still remains
unfixed, because we have a disproportionate amount of IE users. They
essentially forced us to stand up a linode proxy infront of s3 & create our
own CDN, since theirs did not work for our users. In the process we saved
4,000% on our bandwidth.

~~~
kingbirdy
how could you save more than 100%?

~~~
joshribakoff
What I should have said is its 40x cheaper.

But I guess if you factor in not losing customers due to obscure IE problems
on AWS, we could have saved over 100% ;) by not losing customers.

Some businesses don't need to worry about obscure IE problems, and AWS will
make sense, for us it didn't.

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kyledrake
Has anyone ran any benchmarks on this yet? Latency is always an issue with
using these for production static file serving over HTTP (even if it's just
feeding a proxy network).

Another feature it would be nice to see is accidental deletion protection of
some kind. S3 does this with versioning, and it's an important feature lacking
on most of the alternatives:

> Versioning allows you to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of
> every object stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. Once you enable Versioning for a
> bucket, Amazon S3 preserves existing objects anytime you perform a PUT,
> POST, COPY, or DELETE operation on them. By default, GET requests will
> retrieve the most recently written version. Older versions of an overwritten
> or deleted object can be retrieved by specifying a version in the request.

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riobard
Interesting pricing: Base $5/month for 250GB storage and 1TB outbound traffic.
No cost for requests. Additional storage is $0.02/GB/month and additional
outbound traffic is $0.01/GB.

Compared to BackBlaze B2: $0.005/GB/month for storage and $0.02/GB for
traffic, plus tiered API call fees (see [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-
storage-pricing.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-
pricing.html))

So Spaces is better for serving assets (lower traffic cost) and B2 is better
for archiving data (lower storage cost).

~~~
minxomat
Actually I'd say that managed OpenStack Swift is a better solution than B2, if
only marginally more expensive.

Take e.g. OVH's Swift pricing[1], which is $0.011 per GB (stored and
outgoing). I found Swifts latency (at least on the OVH cluster, with the OVH
CDN) to be much better than B2. Swift also satisfies my paranoia about having
a remote storage system I could setup on-prem.

Also, more storage regions, much better network infra, actual access to
software running on the cluster (Swift, not some proprietary API).

YMMV

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

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tyingq
I wonder what the next add on piece will be. There seems to be a progression
here to position themselves as an AWS alternative for budget minded customers.

They already have a sort of "cloud formation" like API for provisioning nodes,
a load balancer, and now object storage.

Maybe a managed database offering? Or managed K8S? Or a more clear "region /
availability zone" strategy?

~~~
wastedhours
I'm hoping for managed database offering next. Not being a sysadmin/devops,
always scared launching any kind of side project because of security concerns,
if DO adds some managed/context specific nodes to their lineup, will make it
much easier to wind things up.

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lux
Congrats on the launch! Love using DO for VMs and this really rounds out the
offering.

Since Google started offering strong consistency that's been a really tempting
feature. We often want to upload something for another user to immediately
access, and having that extra delay or potential 404 with other services
sucks. But Google's pricing is nowhere near B2 or now DO's Spaces.

Any thoughts on eventually adding strong consistency to Spaces?

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unvs
From the introduction document: [1]

> Spaces currently supports v2 of pre-signed URL functionality. Tools and
> libraries that only support v4 of pre-signed URL functionality will not
> work.

I had really hoped this would be in place for the launch, but I guess this
wasn't a priority. Looking forward to this + EU locations!

[1] [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-
introduc...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction-
to-digitalocean-spaces)

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mstade
With no costs for uploads and $5 per every 250GB it sounds like this is
actually probably a pretty nice deal for personal archiving. Of course if
you're also downloading a bunch of that stuff you'll hit that 1TB transfer
ceiling pretty quickly, but it sounds to me like it could be a reasonably
cheap backend for a backup solution – or am I missing something?

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filleokus
Somewhat off-topic but: What is the cheapest cloud storage out there? I don't
care about multi-region or extreme durability, I would just like to store
encrypted blobs containing easily re-creatable data. I need reasonable
download speeds however.

~~~
tyingq
OVH's object storage offering is probably worth looking at:
[https://www.ovh.com/us/public-cloud/storage/object-
storage/](https://www.ovh.com/us/public-cloud/storage/object-storage/)

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

~~~
kawera
Do you have experience with them? What about latency?

~~~
tyingq
I have experience with OVH, but not with this product. They do have a terrific
network, ddos protection, etc, as compared to other low budget dedicated
server vendors. Their support, though, isn't terrific.

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JosephLark
Interesting offering. I'm wondering how people feel about the $5 minimum? At
250GB storage and 1TB traffic, plenty of people using much less than 250GB and
1TB traffic would be better served with a pay for what you use model.

~~~
jlgaddis
As an individual, $5 is easily worth it so I don't have to pay attention to
how much I have in S3 and how much I download. I don't have to worry about
getting a huge bill at the beginning of the month.

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kitotik
I love this company and this new offering. Such a pleasure to work with - from
both a developer and customer perspective.

I only wish the other regions would roll out quicker(sfo please!)

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ernsheong
Any experience/data on rate limits? I heard B2 rate limits a lot. I need to
pour data in at will at a moment's notice without limits.

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heavymark
Curious why they would publish tutorial for Transmit 4 and not Transmit 5. It
says Transmit 5 tutorial will come later but not when. One would think they
would have the tutorial for 5, and then later release one for people still on
Transmit 4. Unless Transmit 5 doesn't support it yet?

Also a bit weird you have to use S3 to connect to it even though it isn't S3,
unless this new feature is S3 but wrapped in Digital Ocean interface?

~~~
beardicus
(DO employee here) It's S3-compatible. Agreed that it's a bit strange in
Transmit and other clients to have to first select "S3" when connecting to
something else entirely... but that's the world we live in.

Spaces isn't working with Transmit 5 yet. I don't have the technical details,
but it's a known issue that's being worked on. I'll write a Transmit 5
tutorial as soon as it works.

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stephenr
Anyone know what this uses under the hood? The reference to erasure coding
specifically reminds me of Minio..

~~~
DonbunEf7
Or Tahoe-LAFS, although Tahoe's encoding doesn't leave any keys with the
provider, but only with the uploader.

~~~
stephenr
Right, I guess I assumed they would use something that already natively
supports the S3 API, which Tahoe doesn't AFAIK?

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DonbunEf7
Actually! (Full disclosure: I sell access to a Tahoe-LAFS grid.) The Tahoe
team has recently been working to merge the "cloud-backend" branch, which
would open the door to storing shares on grids by interfacing directly with
S3, GSE, etc. This technology's been battle-tested by Least Authority
Enterprises, and at least Matador Cloud has indicated a desire to adopt it as
well. Other Tahoe vendors are probably sitting up and taking notice too.

~~~
stephenr
Um, you're talking about using s3 as a storage backend (I think?) whereas im
talking about exposing data over an s3 compatible API (like minio does)

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jlgaddis
This looks like a much cheaper way (than AWS S3) to use Arq to backup my MBP.

~~~
lathiat
I'm currently using rclone with backblaze B2

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minibob
what is differance beetwen cdn and object storage?

i thiink cdn is more cheap. am i wrong?

