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by devit 3926 days ago
Finally some more reasonable prices in this space.

Eventually it could make sense for Backblaze to partner with someone like DigitalOcean or Linode and offer low cost bulk storage and low cost virtualization colocated in the same datacenter: these services seem to be a perfect complement for each other.
2 comments
brianwski 3926 days ago
Brian from Backblaze here. Yeah, our B2 storage may not be a good solution for an application that has to do a lot of analysis on the data over and over again. In Amazon S3 you don't pay for transfers between EC2 and S3, so computing on your data is only as expensive as buying the EC2 time. Since Backblaze doesn't yet offer the EC2 functionality you would need to download your data to analyze it.

What I'd really like is a deal with Amazon where we put a "virtual cross connect" from the Backblaze datacenter into Amazon's EC2 so you could use EC2 instances on B2 data without incurring a download charge (or not exposing that charge to our customers). But I don't know if Amazon is open to that kind of thing.

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jagger27 3926 days ago
Amazon might not be open to it, but I would bet Digital Ocean would be.
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inopinatus 3926 days ago
I would rate the likelihood of AWS offering free, multi-path, multi-Tbps connectivity into their AZs to a competitor to be effectively nil.

If the alternative cloud ecosystem wants to compete effectively against AWS, it desperately needs a more sophisticated authorization scheme. Don't forget that IAM/STS is a major enabling factor in applications integration of EC2 and S3.

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meritt 3926 days ago
Yup. That is the deal breaker for us. Our infrastructure exists on AWS so 100% of the data transfer is free (within the same region). While your per-GB storage is indeed less, the transfer costs would make too expensive ultimately
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scosman 3926 days ago
Amazon offers interconnects with reduced transfer costs: https://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/

A real deal breaker is if you need to use an EC2 server to proxy the upload for any reason (content validation). The transfer into EC2 is free, but it's 9 cents for each GB out (18 months of storage cost).

@brianwski - any suggestions here?

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discodave 3926 days ago
Backblaze + Digital Ocean ... YES.

To elaborate: I think these two would be able to become a viable competitor to AWS. If you think about it AWS launched with S3 and then EC2.

They could differentiate themselves by staying as a pure IaaS play. Then companies like Dropbox would not be afraid of DigitalBlazeOcean moving up the stack and competing as AWS has done in several instances (e.g. WorkDocs).

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