> It's not "cheap". 6 months of S3 is at around price of outright buying 4TB SSD at retail price. That before you do any IOPS to it
This is badly misunderstanding the problem: S3 is a highly available service with geographic redundancy and a huge range of integrated features. Your comparison would need to be updated to include multiple running servers in addition to redundant storage, and the software stack implementing things like immutability, not to mention all of the security features.
That’s not to say that you can’t build equivalents for the parts you use but you either need massive scale or giving up features to do that. For example, if you can tolerate bitrot or long access times if hardware fails, you can definitely get a lower cost per terabyte.
The reason why most people don’t do that, even when they have scale, is that it adds cost and risk everywhere else if you need engineering/ops people working on storage. If you’re, say, the internet archive that might make sense—it’s quite literally why your organization exists—but most other places are going to see all of the integrated features that they don’t have to build and operate paying for the difference between S3 and physical media pricing. For example, if I want to process files as soon as they’re uploaded or have immutability, I can just turn that on rather than having to build more services.
Try doing the math and ask why your time costs. You need to buy a lot of storage to pay for the engineering work and most places would prefer to spend that time and attention on the product rather than shaving a few percent off of the storage bill (especially since the savings will be negative for quite some time).
Again, spec out a multi-data center server + storage + staffing deployment and calculate the full cost per gigabyte. As I said earlier, if you buy enough storage you will definitely hit a level where you can beat S3 by a fair margin but many places never reach that point and many of the ones who do are going to have other projects which make more sense because they offer a high rate of return or provide something which isn’t a commodity.
PunchyHamster · · focus · HN ↗
It's not "cheap". 6 months of S3 is at around price of outright buying 4TB SSD at retail price. That before you do any IOPS to it
S3 is terrible deal on any front. it's just easy
acdha · · focus · HN ↗
This is badly misunderstanding the problem: S3 is a highly available service with geographic redundancy and a huge range of integrated features. Your comparison would need to be updated to include multiple running servers in addition to redundant storage, and the software stack implementing things like immutability, not to mention all of the security features.
That’s not to say that you can’t build equivalents for the parts you use but you either need massive scale or giving up features to do that. For example, if you can tolerate bitrot or long access times if hardware fails, you can definitely get a lower cost per terabyte.
The reason why most people don’t do that, even when they have scale, is that it adds cost and risk everywhere else if you need engineering/ops people working on storage. If you’re, say, the internet archive that might make sense—it’s quite literally why your organization exists—but most other places are going to see all of the integrated features that they don’t have to build and operate paying for the difference between S3 and physical media pricing. For example, if I want to process files as soon as they’re uploaded or have immutability, I can just turn that on rather than having to build more services.
ehe78qhe · · focus · HN ↗
acdha · · focus · HN ↗
Dylan16807 · · focus · HN ↗
Really? No, it's not a few percent.
acdha · · focus · HN ↗
Dylan16807 · · focus · HN ↗
This is very different from the idea that the savings are a few percent. In almost all cases the savings are nothing or a large fraction.