Hacker News Reader

Comment by _1tem | Hacker News Reader

This is a really good idea, beautiful API, and something that I would like to use for my projects. However I have zero confidence that this startup would last very long in its current form. If it's successful, AWS will build a better and cheaper in-house version. It's just as likely to fail to get traction.

If this had been released instead as a Papertrail-like end-user product with dashboards, etc. instead of a "cloud primitive" API so closely tied to AWS, it would make a lot more sense. Add the ability to bring my own S3-Compatible backend (such as Digital Ocean Spaces), and boom, you have a fantastic, durable, cloud-agnostic product.

View on HN

(Founder) we do intend to be multi-cloud, we are just starting with AWS. Our internal architecture is not tied to AWS, it's interfaces that we can implement for other cloud systems.

It would be extra ironic if the whole thing already ran on top of AWS.

There's no end to startups which can be described as existing-open-source-software as a service, marketed as a cheaper alternative to AWS offerings.. who run on AWS.

People keep making the same argument against Aptible (https://aptible.com) and it is still a very successful PaaS over a decade later.

I had never heard of this company so I took a look and the main pitch was compelling and then I went to the pricing page and saw the pricing goes from $0 to $500 a month once you want to go to “production”. i’m clearly not the target market, which makes sense why I’ve never heard it.

It’s popular for security sensitive (e.g. healthcare) stuff

If you do cloud infra stuff, AWS will try to undercut you on price but will never outdo you on D/UX. So I wouldn't let Beezus hold me back

They just did https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42211280 (Amazon S3 now supports the ability to append data to an object, 30 days ago). Azure has had the same with append blobs for a long time. It's still a bit more raw than S2, without the concept of record. The step for a cloud provider to offer this natively is very small. And with the concept of a record, isn't this essentially a message queue, where the competitor space is equally big? Likewise if you look into log storage solutions.

(Founder) Both S3 Express _One Zone_ appends and Azure's append blobs charge the regular PUT price for appends. It may work for you, but probably not if you want to do smaller writes.

Blob stores will also not let you do tailing reads, like you can with S2.

In AWS, S2's Express storage class takes care of writing to a quorum of 3 zonal buckets for regional durability.

I doubt object stores will go from operating at the level of blobs and byte ranges, to records and sequence numbers. But I could be wrong.

Amazon don't compete for price sensitive product offerings.

If anything, they normlise an expectation with a budget aware base.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com