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0 pointsdotwaffle14d ago0 comments

Insanely high S3 storage charges too. $23/TB/month? Even with the insane HDD pricing that we see today, that's paying off a drive in 1 month (at retail) that will last for 50-100 months. Sure, there's probably some encoding overhead, but it's still mad.

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cyberax14d ago

S3 is pretty competitive if you want similarly-performing storage with consistent millisecond-level latency, high scalability, and at least 3x redundancy. Try looking at how much it's going to cost you in enterprise SSDs :)

dotwaffleOP14d ago

Is it 3x redundancy forever? I always just kinda assumed it was RS encoded after a while, so only 30-50% larger than a single copy. Plus, almost all object storage is written to / read from hard disks, not to SSDs. Unless they're in a caching layer that is.

I know Azure has done a bunch of work around Pyramid Codes (essentially a locally repairable EC/RS variant), and Google obviously have the Colossus infrastructure that allows variable encodings, I'd be surprised if AWS is still triple-replicated everywhere.

cyberax14d ago

Yes, and S3 is multiply redundant and is designed to survive a total AZ failure. So your data is physically replicated into at least 2 different AZs and might be multiply-redundant within them. They also provide a crazy SLA for data integrity, meaning that data must never be lost.

S3 also has a reduced redundancy tier and infrequent access tiers that are quite a bit cheaper.

It _is_ expensive, but once you crunch all the numbers, it's actually not unreasonable. I'd argue that using the real S3 is overkill for most scenarios that don't need infinite scalability.

dotwaffleOP14d ago

GCS / Azure can survive a total AZ failure too, think of 3 x Replicas as RAID-1, whereas Erasure Coding is more like RAID-6. Only it's actually more resilient:

Let's say you have 10 data blocks, and you have 4 parity blocks. You can now lose 4 servers containing a block and still be able to repair the data, whereas in 3 x Replica you can only lose 2, and have to store everything 300% of size, instead of only 140%.

And yes, it is unreasonable how much they charge for both storage and inter-az bandwidth.

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cyberax14d ago

dotwaffleOP14d ago

cyberax14d ago

S3 also has a reduced redundancy tier and infrequent access tiers that are quite a bit cheaper.

It _is_ expensive, but once you crunch all the numbers, it's actually not unreasonable. I'd argue that using the real S3 is overkill for most scenarios that don't need infinite scalability.

dotwaffleOP14d ago

GCS / Azure can survive a total AZ failure too, think of 3 x Replicas as RAID-1, whereas Erasure Coding is more like RAID-6. Only it's actually more resilient:

And yes, it is unreasonable how much they charge for both storage and inter-az bandwidth.

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