Key points:
- It's just for the "S3 Express One Zone" bucket class, which is more expensive (16c/GB/month compared to 2.3c for S3 standard tier) and less highly available, since it lives in just one availability zone
- "With each successful append operation, you create a part of the object and each object can have up to 10,000 parts. This means you can append data to an object up to 10,000 times."
That 10,000 parts limit means this isn't quite the solution for writing log files directly to S3.
Azure supports 50,000 parts, zone-redundancy, and append blobs are supported in the normal "Hot" tier, which is their low-budget mechanical drive storage.
Note that both 10K and 50K parts means that you can use a single blob to store a day's worth of logs and flush every minute (1,440 parts). Conversely, hourly blobs can support flushing every second (3,600 parts). Neither support daily blobs with per-second flushing for a whole day (86,400 parts).
Typical designs involve a per-server log, per hour. So the blob path looks like:
"{account}/{path}/{year}/{month}/{day}/{hour}_{servername}.txt"
The typical workflow is to run a daily consolidation into an indexed columnstore format like Parquet, or send it off to Splunk, Log Analytics, or whatever...
Microsoft had the benefit of starting later and learning from Amazon's failures and successes. S3 dates from 2006.
That being said, both Microsoft and Google learned a lot, but also failed at learning different things.
GCP has a lovely global network, which makes multi-region easy. But they spent way too much time on GCE and lost the early advantage they had with Google App Engine.
Azure severely lacks in security (check out how many critical cross-tenant security vulnerabilities they've had in the past few years) and reliability (how many times have there been various outages due to a single DC in Texas failing; availability zones still aren't the default there).
https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/composite-objects#appe...
[0] https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2024/07/merging-objects-in-google-...
If your compute is on AWS, using R2 (or anything outside of AWS) for object storage means you pay AWS egress for “in-system” operations rather than at the system boundary, which is often much more expensive (plus, you also probably add a bunch of latency compared to staying on AWS infra.) And unless you are exposing your object store directly externally as your interface to the world, you still pay AWS egress at the boundary.
Now, if all you use AWS for is S3, R2 may be, from a cost perspective, a no brainer, but who does that?
Does anybody know if appending still has that 5TB file limit ?
I have been using azure storage append blob to store logs of long running tasks with periodic flush (see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/u...)
To compare the other way, Azure write blocks target replication blob containers. I consider that a primitive and yet they just outright say you can’t do it. When I engaged our TPM on this we were just told our expectations were wrong and we were thinking about the problem wrong.
> Azure write blocks target replication blob containers
I am sorry but what does it mean?
The goal of my question was about what are the differences between the two solutions: I know HN is a place where I can read technical arguments based on actual experience.
> S3 Express One Zone delivers data access speed up to 10x faster and request costs up to 50% lower than S3 Standard [0]
The critical difference seems to be in availability (1 AZ)
[0] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/express-one-zone/
Egress and storage however are more expensive on express one than any other tier. For comparison, glacier (instant), standard and express are $0.004, $0.023 and $0.16 per GB. Although slight, standard tier also receives additional discounts above 50 TB.
The house always wins https://www.vantage.sh/blog/amazon-s3-express-one-zone
S3 is often used as a lowest common denominator, and a lot of the features of azure and gcs aren’t leveraged by libraries and formats that try to be cross platform so only want to expose features that are available everywhere.
If these days all object stores do append then perhaps all the data storage formats and libs can start leveraging it?
Edit: oh it’s only in one AZ
Most of them cheaper, some MUCH cheaper.
S3 has stagnated for a long time, allowing it to become a standard.
Third parties have cloned the storage service and a vast array of software is compatible. There’s drivers, there’s file transfer programs and utilities.
What does it mean that Amazon is now changing it.
Does Amazon even really own the standard any more, does it have the right to break the long standing standards?
I’m reminded of IBM when they broke compatibility of the PS/2 computers just so it could maintain dominance.