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Amazon S3 now supports the ability to append data to an object
- electroly 2y agoThe original title is "Amazon S3 Express One Zone now supports the ability to append data to an object" and the difference is extremely important! I was excited for a moment.
- exac 2y agoI wonder what the implications for all the s3-like APIs is going to be.
- insomniacity 2y agoGood point - plus the conditional writes recently announced. Did anyone else implement that?
- 100pctremote 2y agoMinIO actually supported conditional writes a year before S3
- msoad 2y agoDoes it really work for livestreams? Can I stream read and write on the same video file? That is huge if true! Edit: oh it’s only in one AZ
- jrpelkonen 2y agoLivestream is not usually done by writing to/reeding from a single media file. Instead, the media is broken into few second long segments. The current set of segments are indicated by a HLS and/or DASH manifest, which is updated as new segments appear.
- merek 2y agoThis is specifically for S3 "Express One Zone"
- teractiveodular 2y agoFor comparison, while GCS doesn't support appends directly, there's hacky but effective workaround in that you can compose existing objects together into new objects, without having to read & write the data. If you have existing object A, upload new object B, and compose A and B together so that the resulting object is also called A, this effectively functions the same as appending B into A. https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/composite-objects#appends https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/composite-objects#appe...
- pclmulqdq 2y agoColossus allows appends, so it would make sense that there's a backdoor way to take advantage of that in GCS. It seemed silly of me that Google didn't just directly allow appends given the architecture.
- vdm 2y agoS3 can also do this https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/API_UploadPartCopy.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/API_UploadPa...
- new_user_final 2y agoIt's totally different thing and requires special way to initiate multi-part uploading.
- thinkharderdev 2y agoIt's similar but no really the same thing. It has to be done up front by initiating a multi-part upload to start. The parts are still technically accessible as S3 objects but through a different API. But the biggest limitation is that each part has to be >5MB (except for the final part)
- kylegalbraith 2y agoI got excited until I saw the one zone part. That is a critical difference in terms of cost.
- juancampa 2y agoIsn't it cheaper than normal S3 though? > 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/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/express-one-zone/
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rrampage 2y agoStorage cost is much higher. Express One Zone is $0.16 per GB while standard S3 is $0.023 per GB ( https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=4 https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=4 )
- Maxious 2y ago> Compared to S3 Standard, even though the new class offers 50% cheaper request pricing—storage is almost seven times more expensive. The house always wins https://www.vantage.sh/blog/amazon-s3-express-one-zone https://www.vantage.sh/blog/amazon-s3-express-one-zone
- datatrashfire 2y agoIngress pricing is indeed cheaper. POST is $0.005 per thousand requests on standard and $0.0025 on express one. 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.
- chx 2y agoIf you want to know the differences between Express One Zone and normal, check https://www.vantage.sh/blog/amazon-s3-express-one-zone https://www.vantage.sh/blog/amazon-s3-express-one-zone this blog post. I had no idea this even existed. tl;dr: it's x7 expensive.
- simonw 2y agoWrote some notes on this here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/22/amazon-s3-append-data/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/22/amazon-s3-append-data/ 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.
- omeid2 2y agoNot directly, but enough to write once every hour for more than a year!
- simonw 2y agoYeah, or I guess log rotation will work well - you can write 10,000 lines to one key and then switch to a new key name.
- santiagobasulto 2y agoThis will require some serious buffering.
- jiggawatts 2y agoWow, I'm surprised it took AWS this long to (mostly) catch up to Azure, which had this feature back in 2015: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/understanding-block-blobs--append-blobs--and-page-blobs#about-append-blobs https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/u... 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" This seems insane, but it's not a file system! You don't need to create directories, and you're not supposed to read these using VIM, Notepad, or whatever. 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...
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoPlease fix title: Amazon S3 Express One Zone now supports the ability to append data to an object
- thecleaner 2y agoI don't understand the bashing in the comments. I image this is a tough distributed systems challenge (as with anything S3). Of course AWS is charging more since they've cracked it. Does anybody know if appending still has that 5TB file limit ?
- klysm 2y agoThis sounds like a thin wrapper over an underlying object store
- sureIy 2y agoIt's crazy to me that anyone would still consider S3 after R2 was made available, given the egress fees. I regularly see people switching to R2 and saving thousands or hundreds of thousands by switching.
- compootr 2y agodoesn't s3 have 'free' (subsidized!) transfer to other products like ec2 though? it might look better to businesspeople that "well, we're doing this processing on ec2, why not keep our objects in s3 since it's a bit cheaper!"
- mjlee 2y agoS3 has free data transfer within the same region.
- YetAnotherNick 2y agoIn most cases S3 data is not directly exposed to the client. If the middleware is EC2, then you need to pay the same egress fee, but you you will have lower latency with S3, as EC2 shares the same datacenter as S3.
- JonoBB 2y agoFor the most part I agree, but we have found that R2 does not handle large files (hundreds of GB or larger) very well. It will often silently fail with nothing being returned, so it’s not possible to handle it gracefully.
- remus 2y agoDepends a bit on your use case. If you've got lots of other infra on AWS and you don't need to store that much data then the downside of using another platform can outweigh the cost savings.
- lijok 2y agoPeople still use S3 because doing business with Cloudflare is a liability.
- from-nibly 2y agoLogs are a terrible usecase for this. Loki already existed and it uses the cheaper more highly available s3
- styx31 2y agoI am surprised it was not supported until now? How does it compare to azure blob append (which exists for years)? 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/understanding-block-blobs--append-blobs--and-page-blobs https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/u...)
- xkqd 2y agoI know the whole point of cloud services is to pick and choose, but in general I wouldn’t express “outrage” or scoff when comparing Azure to AWS. I recommend Azure to the smallest and leanest of shops, but when you compare functionality matrices and maturity Azure is a children’s toy. 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.
- styx31 2y agoI did not want to express any outrage (even sarcastically), just surprise and the fact that I don't know very well the AWS offer. > 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.
- andrewstuart 2y agoThere are many, many S3 compatible storage services out there provided by other companies. Most of them cheaper, some MUCH cheaper.
- orthoxerox 2y agoBut most of them are compliant with the standard S3 API. If I use AWS SDK to write data to my on-prem Ceph/Minio/SeaweedFS/Hitachi storage, I want this SDK to support the concept of appending data to an object.
- water9 2y agoIncredible breakthrough. What will they come up with next the ability to remove data from an object? It’s clear that not working from home is really working out for them
- wood_spirit 2y agoWill be exciting to see what adaptations are needed and how performance and cost changes for delta lake and iceberg and other cloud mutable data storage formats. It could be really dramatic! 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?
- andrewstuart 2y agoAmazon has no right to do this - it no longer owns the S3 standard and should respect the ecosystem and community. 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.
- supermatt 2y agoThis doesnt seem very useful for many cases, given that you NEED to specify a write offset in order for it to work. So you need to either track the size (which becomes more complex if you have multiple writers), or need to first request the size every time you want to do a write and then race for it using the checksum of the current object... Urghhh.
- taeric 2y agoI'm curious on the different use cases for this? Firehose/kinesis whatever the name seems to have the append case covered in ways that I would think has fewer foot guns?
- maryndisouza 2y agoThis is a fantastic addition to Amazon S3 Express One Zone! The ability to directly append data to existing objects opens up new possibilities for real-time data processing applications. Whether it's continuously adding log entries or appending video segments in a media workflow, this feature will streamline workflows and improve efficiency for many use cases. It's great to see AWS continuing to innovate and make data management even more flexible and user-friendly. Excited to see how this feature enhances the scalability of applications across various industries!
- crest 2y agoI wonder at which point they'll admit they've added back all the complexity of a hierarchical filesystem.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]