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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

I havent looked at OVH lately, but are they really a cloud? Do they provide full VPC with central firewall? Dynamic network disk storage that can be mapped to servers?

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OVH does have their vRack stuff these days, but it's iffy and clearly intended for dedicated hardware. They have no block storage that I'm aware of.

They do have it: https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/public-cloud/storage/additional-di...

It's OpenStack Cinder.

They also have object storage, Swift: https://www.ovh.com/ca/en/public-cloud/storage/object-storag...

TIL, thanks! Didn't realize OVH was OpenStack--that's a pretty hard no for me, because I've witnessed firsthand the failure conditions there, but I appreciate the correction.

How does EBS work, anyway? Is it some form of NFS with caching under the hood?

It's not NFS, it's a block storage mechanism. NFS presents a file-based interface, EBS is a block/device-based interface. The underlying implementation isn't widely publicized, but if you think about how a block device works on a Unix and the AWS bigger-is-faster model for non-PIOPS EBS, you can probably draw some reasonable inferences.

PIOPS?

Provisioned/guaranteed IOPS.

EBS is some kind of Network Block Device. NFS is another product, https://aws.amazon.com/efs/

IIRC EBS is based on GNBD.

Such rumors have been around for quite a while -- Amazon is not talking -- but their relevant patent https://www.google.com/patents/US8769186 has

> For example, in at least some embodiments, a representative logical local block data storage device may be made available to an executing program via use of GNBD (“Global Network Block Device”) technology.

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