budmang

(backblaze ceo here) We're happy to take customers regardless of which API they choose. Sure, we make a bit more on our B2 Native APIs, but ultimately I'd rather we make it easy for them to use us how they wish.

(backblaze ceo here) Google and Azure continue to offer their own API as do we. They also offer S3 compatibility options to support customers who want to use S3-compatible products...as now do we ;-)

(backblaze ceo here) Just fyi, you can put both accounts into a single Group for easier management: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000014914

(backblaze ceo here) Yes, easy to move the data to a compatible bucket using our B2 CLI or Transmit: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047120614-Ho...

(backblaze ceo here) B2 is a great origin store for your video files. If you're streaming to lots of viewers, using a CDN with Backblaze B2 is optimal. We partnered with Cloudflare as a founding member of the Bandwidth Alliance so you can store your videos with B2 and transit them for free to Cloudflare, which can serve to your viewers.

(backblaze ceo here) We also have a region in Europe: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/announcing-our-first-european...

No gateway - native code written from scratch and optimized for our environment...sitting on top of regular, inexpensive hardware.

Can you share what you do with B2? (Are you hosting educational content? Something else?)

(backblaze ceo here) AWS is free to Cloudfront because that's an AWS service. AWS/GCP/Azure are not free (and quite expensive) to Cloudflare. Backblaze is free to Cloudflare.

We’re happy to help. Shoot me an email and I’ll connect you.

Gleb (founder @ Backblaze) Gleb.budman at Backblaze

Looks like they're in Germany/Finland. We'll try.

I guess we can explore with DO, but certainly will with Linode.

Which functions are you using?

B2 is object storage. Similar to any object storage you generally want to use it for storing the data, not running heavy analytics directly on it. Usually you'd want to move the data to the directly attached block storage (which our compute partners offer) to run the actual analysis.

By 'similar' do you mean having a German trustee or something else?

Thanks - definitely looking near there.

Agree - would love to connect some data warehouse services. (Seems Spark & Drill are not hosted, but a customer could run those in a compute provider.)

SlicingDice worked for me. Are you still getting an offline page?

Great - we'll try to connect with them.

Excellent. We just created this Google Form to add/recommend partners: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdObw8HKH4uDexOg-fl...

Does it matter where in Europe for you? And curious which of the various reasons does a European presence matter to you most?

Just to add a bit more color - we're actively aiming to have a European region by end of year.

Would love to help your company with their storage needs. Feel free to email me: gleb.budman at backblaze

BTW, this person is figuring out how to do transcoding of files their files in B2 as well: https://twitter.com/orlandoferrer/status/981205299532124163

Hey Byran - what do you hope to do with it?

Thanks for the kudos. We're open to supporting other providers as well, including other types of services beyond compute (e.g. databases and specific verticals.)

Do you have some specific providers you were interested in having connected?

We're thrilled about this. In short, we've directly connected our storage and their compute to ensure fast connections, and made the data transfers free. We've heard some ways people want to use this (disaster recovery, transcoding, rendering) - but would love to hear ways that you might. Thank you!

Gleb from Backblaze

We've shared the underlying cost of building Storage Pod storage servers for years. This takes a higher level approach and breaks down overall costs including datacenter/power, people, bandwidth, etc. Happy to try and answer additional questions.

Gleb from Backblaze

Got it. Let me look into that. Agree that if you're just taking a snapshot from Elasticsearch and putting into B2, that should be an implementalbe plug-in.

Any questions about building the business from folks here? (Happy to try and answer.)

Gleb @ Backblaze

Neither is hard. Want to do both. Just have a list of hundreds of requests and have to prioritize ;-)

Hard to keep up with all conversations on-line, but HN tends to be high signal-to-noise, and I appreciate the feedback we get.