[HN Gopher] Switching from S3 to Tigris on Fly.io
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Switching from S3 to Tigris on Fly.io
        
       Author : ingve
       Score  : 53 points
       Date   : 2024-02-13 18:22 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (benhoyt.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (benhoyt.com)
        
       | teitoklien wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | koolba wrote:
         | > 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?
        
           | teitoklien wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | benhoyt wrote:
         | 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...
        
       | frenchman99 wrote:
       | > Tigris paid me a small amount to try their beta and write about
       | it, but they didn't have a say in the content.
       | 
       | Yes, right. People pay for negative reviews all the time. The
       | article can still have merit. But that disclaimer is
       | manipulative. Better just say "Tigris paid me for this content"
       | and nothing else. Also, a "small amount" can be anything, it's
       | all relative to what the author thinks is small.
        
         | benhoyt wrote:
         | Author here. I hear what you're saying. However, I tend to
         | write articles like this even without being paid -- for
         | example, I wasn't asked or paid when I wrote about switching my
         | site to Fly.io originally: https://benhoyt.com/writings/flyio/
         | 
         | Also, as you'll see in this article, I'm not shy about
         | describing issues I ran into or concerns I have: for example, I
         | don't think it's good that they set Cache-Control to max-
         | age=3600 by default, and I have concerns about their
         | durability.
        
         | apitman wrote:
         | I don't find that manipulative. Agree "small amount" is
         | ambiguous though.
        
       | emmanueloga_ wrote:
       | Oh, looks like Tigris pivoted from Mongo alternative to S3
       | provider... [1]. Probably they are still based on FoundationDB?
       | 
       | It seems like they charge for outbound traffic? Why would someone
       | use Tigris instead of R2? [2][3]
       | 
       | --
       | 
       | 1:
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20220812231246/https://www.tigri...
       | 
       | 2: https://www.tigrisdata.com/docs/pricing/
       | 
       | 3: https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/pricing/
        
         | k__ wrote:
         | Good question!
         | 
         | R2 seems to be quite cheap for the right use cases.
        
       | k__ wrote:
       | I'm planning to migrate some block storage data to object storage
       | this year and since I'm hosting on Fly, this could be
       | interesting.
        
       | starptech wrote:
       | Competition is good, but Fly.io has proven problematic based on
       | my two years of production experience. Anyone requiring
       | reliability, professional support should avoid using services
       | with significantly less experience than their competitors, such
       | as S3, Cloud Buckets, and R2. Personally, I do not trust any
       | service that relies on Fly.io. This perspective may change, but
       | so far, they have proven to be an unreliable partner.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-02-13 23:01 UTC)