[derekp7]

Are there any plans to add application hosting along with this offering? Specifically, it could be useful to have a shim application that has direct access to the data without traversing the Internet, to minimize what needs to be transferred. For example, if used for a backup application, each day's incremental delta may be in one archive, but a periodic operation would be to move files from one archive to another. Or a full system restore may be pulling some data out of multiple archives, and a "shim" app (running within Backblaze's data center) would eliminate unnecessary transfers out.

[brianwski]

Brian from Backblaze here. We'll add a LITTLE bit of app hosting support around this, but you won't be seeing a full blown EC2 type of product out of Backblaze for a while, realistically we don't have a large enough team to charge down that path and still do a great job at B2 and also our traditional online backup product that we still maintain.

What I'd really like in the short term is to do 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.