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Comment by altcognito | Hacker News Reader

I was unaware that Amazon even sold single AZ S3. 20% discount. Doesn't seem worth it. By the time I commit to purchasing S3 space, it has to be important data.

I get that S3 is convenient and reasonably performant, but it is not cheap at all.

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That’s simply not true. I use S3 (well GCS mostly) for data that I wouldn’t be upset if it’s lost. And I pay the zonal discount for it.

Google internally has lots of possible redundancy levels for data.

They don't sell any of the lower and less reliable levels to the public, I suspect simply because the reputational damage from losing user data is so bad, and the news will take no notice of the fact the user got a discount for less reliable storage.

Most of Google's customers wouldn't know how to choose anyways, if these were exposed. My memory was quite hazy but I recall having a discussion with my colleague on choosing which Reed–Solomon code for our Colossus files, and apparently the choice was down to RS(8,3) or RS(9,3). I don't think even as Googlers we really had enough information to make an informed choice. Comparatively it was much easier to decide which cells to use for multi-location replication in Placer.

You call it "discount" but it's a 20% discount on a 10x inflated price, so it's an 8x inflated price

Single AZ S3 has other benefits. The point isn't the price, it's that it's _highly performant_ since you can keep all of your reads in the same AZ

It's a great service for large caches. For example, we process a lot of imagery that we download from third-party providers. We save a lot of latency by storing the data in a single-AZ S3.

If it dies, we will just have to re-download the data.

Yeah agreed - any ephemeral stuff I need is generally in DynamoDB - S3 (and database) are for permanent storage.

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