> Does Backblaze really want this sort of traffic profile?
Oh heck yes, we would very much like your business! :-)
Backblaze only charges you $0.005/GByte/Month so your $436.77 bill would go down to $94.95 and we would be happy to have it. That is profitable for us. (Since Backblaze doesn't have any deep pockets or VC funding, we have to stay profitable.)
Although I agree that storage density growth for HDDs has greatly outstripped any I/O growth, I don't agree that the latter has been flat (i.e. no growth).
Are you sure you're not doing something like comparing 7200rpm drives from 10 years ago to 5900rpm (or slower) or variable-speed "green" or even SMR drives from today?
That said, I think what many people forget is that for "cloud" storage, the I/O bottleneck is almost certainly going to be the network and not the backend storage, especially for mainly sequential access.
If each of their "pods" holds 60 drives and each "vault" holds 20 pods (17 of which are non-parity data), that's over a thousand drives per vault. If each drive is 7200rpm non-SMR, it can saturate a 1Gb ethernet with sequential I/O, and random I/O would divide that by 10 or so. That's the equivalent of 100Gb/s, per vault.
That kind of bandwidth is possible and even affordable to provision inside the datacenter without metering and charging for it and is likely to dwarf the size of the connection to the Internet.
This is because they were pushing an average of 112 requests per second, the entire month.
I understand, I was comparing the storage cost.
Backblaze publishes a cost calculator here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html (scroll down, it is half way down that page). But it might not contain transactions.
Backblaze does charge for transactions to recoup costs from that sort of thing. But it isn't intended as a "profit mechanism", we believe we approximately break even on the bill for transactions.
In this case their bill would have had $115.89 for the 290 million requests.
Glad to see it's not a free lunch, I'm sorry for assuming otherwise.
And thanks for b2, it's a great service :)