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Comment by khazit | Hacker News Reader

I still think S3 is underutilized.

The range of things you can do with blob storage and a (very simple) auth model are surprisingly broad.

We recently replaced our Docker container registry with S3 using a tiny tool [1] we built in-house. I think that even with current capabilities, we can still model a lot services as a very thin layer over object storage.

[1]: https://github.com/Simple-Observability/grue

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From the opposite side of things, I feel the same about OPFS. Finally having something that performant that multiple workers can operate against in a browser is such a massive boon. You could plug something like that in to it locally with markedly less bullshit than you would have had to do previously with the other APIs.

That sounds really cool — I tend to agree with you that S3 and similar are underutilized, but I remember that essentially all of the providers charge for bandwidth measured in gigabytes and I'm like no. My consumer line is measured in megabits per second and if I have to pay for my data usage the way it's paid for in data centers it would be far more expensive. Somehow consumer ISPs, who have to pay for the lines, are cheaper than than the cloud providers.

It's because for providers the bottleneck isn't capacity (which is dirt cheap) but IOPS and bandwidth. To keep transfers fast they need to spread data across a lot of physical disks, meaning they often times sit mostly empty. Egress fees are a way to monetize that empty storage and make sure there is an incentive to minimize egress traffic.

We use R2 (not affiliated) which doesn't have egress fees.

It's because for providers the bottleneck isn't capacity (which is dirt cheap) but IOPS and bandwidth

This is known as Stockholm Syndrome.

"I remember that essentially all of the providers charge for bandwidth measured in gigabytes" - sure, but the cost per GB is shockingly cheap. If you're doing things well, you can do a lot inside those pricing structures.

Alternatively you can stand up your own object store services, but that's not something I would like to do.

> the cost per GB is shockingly cheap

Huh? We're talking about the same S3 right? At list pricing, 1TB is $23/TB to store for one month, and about $90/TB (plus request fees) to send it out to the internet.

While hard drive prices are roughly 3x what they were a year ago, the price per TB of a new hard disk averages around $30/TB -- assume 2x overhead for other hardware and extra space for parity etc, a disk pays for itself in less than 3 months and lasts 5 years or more.

If you assume it takes 1 month to download that 1TB (about 3Mb/s) that's $29.16/Mbps. When I first started buying internet transit in Europe back in 2008 I think I was paying under $10/month. It's now under $0.10/Mbps pretty much anywhere in the US or Europe at the big datacenters.

None of the "big" object storage services are cheap. They're somewhat reasonable if you only access the data from within the same region, but absolutely insane if you ever want to ship that data outside of that cloud vendor (or to another region etc). The pricing of storage and egress has not changed in a decade (I believe AWS last lowered the price of either in 2016) and in fact it costs even more now due to things like NAT Gateways etc.

It's definitely not "shockingly cheap". It's just cheaper than $80/TB of gp3 or $45/TB of st1, and while sc1 is $15/TB it has a baseline performance of only 12 MB/s. There's quite a few companies out there that have $6/TB/month object storage plans with similar performance, rising to about $15-$18/TB/month for SSD backed storage with far lower latency figures.

AWS have found the ideal captive market: computer engineers who don't know how computers work or how much they should cost.

Whatever AWS is selling you - except Deep Archive - I'll figure out a way to sell you for half that price, if you want, and it'll still be 80% profit for me. Your only downside will be that I don't know what I'm doing so it might not be reliable - but neither is AWS.

Not just AWS. IIRC, GCS and ABS are slightly cheaper for storage but more for egress. To be fair to them, their reliability is pretty much second-to-none, whereas many of those at the very cheap end pretty much just ran a Ceph/RADOS cluster and then wondered why they were having lots of problems with reliability -- but with things like RustFS becoming more and more popular, the object storage racket is long overdue a shake-up!

We run Ceph at work. Reliability problems have been exclusively caused by us penny-pinching and trying to have as few drives and servers as possible, causing latency issues. If we had a nice margin instead, I can't see there would be any problems.

Not really. 1TB is 90 USD, so if you are doing anything with video that is gone pretty quickly. Same with software distribution - your 200mb download hits that with 5000 downloads. Convert a 10 usd trial at 1 percent and almost 20% is eaten in bandwidth charges.

At those prices, it only makes sense to use it for data that never leaves that providers cloud (which I assume, but cannot prove, is their intention).

> My consumer line is measured in megabits per second and if I have to pay for my data usage the way it's paid for in data centers it would be far more expensive

Well because your provider assumes you are not using all your bandwidth constantly. Cloud bandwidth is only billed for you actually use

It's still true that "clouds" cost much more than proper internet connections at DCs. E.g. AWS wants you to pay $90/TB, Hetzner $1.50/TB, a good deal on a contract is probably half what Hetzner pays since they need profit too.

And if you have two specific endpoints you need to transfer data between at a high rate, you can get stupidly cheap cost per GB on a leased line in exchange for making all that commitment upfront.

Depending on your use case, exposing S3 data with CloudFront will decrease the transport cost.

Have you seen Zot? It's a more full-featured extension of this same idea, and also supports S3 as a storage backend: https://zotregistry.dev/v2.1.21/articles/storage/#configurin...

I'm a little surprised the Docker CLI doesn't support this directly, since gcr.io works this way. Maybe there's a thin layer between the bucket and the CLI? Neat that you worked it out for the generic case.

I was surprised too! The OCI layout for storing images is actually pretty simple. But for some weird reason you can't stream it straight into Docker. docker load only accepts tarballs.

So you need something to wrap the layout into something Docker understands. Because S3 is not a server, you have to construct the tarball on the fly as the image is pulled and stream it straight into docker load.

I worked on OCI for quite a while, the very short and cynical answer is that Docker thought the registry was their moat for a long time and fought tooth and nail to keep it at the detriment of almost everything else. (The longer version is a bit more diplomatic.)

Even better, the OCI distribution protocol (which was Docker distribution until a few years ago) is not a static-blob-over-HTTP protocol! The blob bits are and you can route them to blob storage but you need a smart server for a few key bits of the protocol.

Back in the day I made proposals for distribution formats that didn't have these flaws and were more distributed (and previous proposals like AppC's discovery had similar ideas) but they were roundly rejected by the Docker people.

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