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Comment by teitoklien | Hacker News Reader

This blog is faulty in several ways

1- The author compares performance of this provider Tigris with AWS S3 and how the latencies are 300ms and 1s respectively for the test image, fully aware that Tigris built on top of fly.io comes with a cdn combined, unlike S3, a fair comparison would have been comparing Tigris with AWS S3 + AWS Cloudfront(AWS CDN) combination (both in terms of cost savings and speed)

2- No mention on reliability, a lot of S3 alternatives have spawned up over the years, and they’ve all faced data corruption issues to some extent, that can be horrendous for a lot of object storage usecases. It sucks to put down new companies who are trying innovation, but storage layer as crucial as object storage requires reputation and proven resiliency often times.

Still pretty cool project ! Props to fly.io and tigris for making new alternatives to AWS.

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1. You're right, it's somewhat apples and oranges. However, from what I can tell, that's part of the selling point of Tigris: you get CDN-like features "for free", without having to set up an extra layer like Cloudfront.

2. I actually do describe my concerns about durability near the end: https://benhoyt.com/writings/flyio-and-tigris/#disclaimer-an...

1. It takes 10 mins to setup cloudfront with s3 as a source, heck 3 mins if one is experienced, it cannot be a selling point for a provider,

But having an s3 like provider directly inside fly.io, is a pretty cool selling point by itself :D

2. Indeed, noticed the disclaimer now, was just commenting overall in the hn post :D

Have a great day !

Hi, co-founder of Tigris here. There is a key difference between Tigris and a CDN. Tigris doesn't simply provide read caching like CloudFront. It allows what I call dynamic caching, i.e., you can literally update the object anywhere in the world, and any cached versions of the objects will be updated. So, I think of Tigris simply as a global object storage service, and the fact that it has caching built-in is more to provide fast performance and low latency than simply to mimic CDN behavior. But if you want to build a CDN, Tigris makes it trivial for a single developer to build a CDN.

> It allows what I call dynamic caching, i.e., you can literally update the object anywhere in the world, and any cached versions of the objects will be updated.

how much it typically takes to propagate the changes? Also what is the consistency model of the storage?

> No mention on reliability, a lot of S3 alternatives have spawned up over the years, and they’ve all faced data corruption issues to some extent, that can be horrendous for a lot of object storage usecases.

Data corruption is horrendous for all use cases. But if the use case is backups, it’s particularly horrendous.

When you say “all”, do you mean the other big two players too? Or just the new crop of smaller ones?

I haven’t personally heard dataloss issues with big 3, but have previous read and heard about dataloss (very rare) in other smaller startups.

I remember wasabi one time losing the data of a customer (no comments tho, its very rare and they are significantly cheaper than big 3, so you get what you pay for)

But personally, I’d never touch azure, they get hacked every 3 months or so, get some sort of a fatal bug on their critical products, google and aws much better in that regard.

Personally I do not trust object storage much at all, and like keeping an offline backup of aws s3 objects (its not a snapshot, but rather and continuously updating locally stored disk backup, that tracks all S3 changes with s3’s etag parameter and a postgres table, ofcourse might be hard to continue at larger scales.

An alternative to AWS S3 only makes sense from a pricing standpoint, otherwise they are the king, my favourite feature is their AWS S3 Upload Accelerator, which speeds up user uploading of assets to your object storage, very handy for my current startup.

But yea, overall I’d be very wary of using AWS S3 alternative except for the most simplest of usecases. It’s a very polished, well integrated product from amazon at this point. Most startups in the S3 space, do. not. compare.

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