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by knobbytires 3254 days ago
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.

7 comments

> 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.

Validating claims of S3 compatibility is important. The S3 API has corner cases like and misfeatures like BitTorrent hosting but sometimes vendors omit key features like multi-part upload and v4 signatures. s3-tests[1] is the best way we have to evaluate implementations yet only Ceph and S3Proxy seem to contribute to it. Users should hold vendors' feet to the fire about these these claims.

[1] https://github.com/ceph/s3-tests

>Their first round was debt financing.

Are you suggesting that Wasabi might go away because, maybe, this is not the "traditional" valley model?

Many, many startups in the valley have raised on convertible notes (aka debt) first.
Indeed. That's what I don't understand. Nothing about the funding is notable.

Convertible notes were all the rage a few years back, too. It was all over the blogs and HN.

>but a pure S3 endpoint will never take substantial marketshare away from AWS.

Perhaps in the "dev/ops" world, but S3 as a standalone repository could absolutely work for most enterprises and quite frankly soho users as a backup target. That being said, I have almost no faith this will survive and as such wouldn't trust it with my backups.

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.

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

What if they deploy a silent corruption bug next year?

Also you can change your s3 bucket to enable multi-factor delete, which essentially makes it immutable unless you delete using a 2fa device, which shouldn't really happen accidently.
There would be still a lot of tooling needed around just lambda like serverless compute layer.
I've found that most people / companies actually do use S3 alone. Adoption of S3 on it's own is far greater than the rest of their services, at least in my experience.
> - Their durability claims are highly suspect. I would want to see a white paper breaking this down.

Is there such a white paper for AWS/Azure/GCP? Or are they running on reputation alone?

So would it be a fair assessment to say Wasabi is to S3, as Flask is to Django?
It would map better to a Django app rather than Flask