[smueller1234]

Concur, Colossus is one of the examples where Google built what almost feels like magic technology. I work on Google Storage (among other things), and I've wished for a Cloud offering that exposes Colossus for years.

I don't know that it took "AI branding" to convince anybody. I think these workloads potentially enabled additional demand/market for such a product that may not have been there before.

One of the challenges with exposing native Colossus was always that it's just different enough from how people elsewhere are used to use Storage that there was a lot of uncertainty about the addressable market of a "native" Colossus offering. It's not a POSIX file system. Some of the specific differences (eg. no random writes) are part of what makes Colossus powerful and performant on HDDs, but it means you have to write your application to work well within its constraints. Google has been doing that for a long time. If you haven't, even if it's an amazing product, is it worth rewriting your applications or middleware?

Rapid Storage basically addresses this by adding the object store API on top if it (TIL from this thread that there's a lower abstraction client in the works as well).

Anyway, the team behind this is awesome. Awesome tech, awesome people. Seeing this launched at Next and seeing some appreciation on HN makes me very grateful.