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by fulafel 187 days ago
You can do app optimizations to work with object databases that are slow for small objects, or you can have a fast object database - doesn't seem that black and white. If you can build a fast object database that is robust and solves that problem well, it's (hopefully) a non leaky abstraction that can warrant some complexity inside.

The tar -cvf is a good analogy though, are you working with a virtual tape drive or a virtual SSD.
1 comments
kburman 187 days ago
Expecting the storage layer to fix an inefficient I/O pattern (millions of tiny network requests) is optimizing the wrong part of the stack.

> are you working with a virtual tape drive or a virtual SSD.

Treating a networked object store like a local SSD ignores the Fallacies of Distributed Computing. You cannot engineer away the speed of light or the TCP stack.

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fulafel 186 days ago
SSD (over nvme) and TCP (over 100gbe) both exhibit low tens of microseconds of latency as the low bound. This is ignoring redundancy for both of course, but the cost of that should also be similar between the two.

If the storage is farther away, then you'll go slower of course. But since the article is comparing to EFS and S3 Express, it's fitting to talk about a nearby scenarios I think. And the point of the article was that S3 Express was more problematic for cost than small-object performance reasons.

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