In May 2020, Backblaze, a founding Bandwidth Alliance partner announced S3 compatible APIs for their B2 Cloud Storage service. As a refresher, the Bandwidth Alliance is a group of forward-thinking cloud and networking companies that are committed to discounting or waiving data transfer fees for shared customers. Backblaze has been a proud partner since 2018. We are excited to see Backblaze introduce a new level of compatibility in their Cloud Storage service.
History of the S3 API
First let’s dive into the history of the S3 API and why it’s important for Cloudflare users.
Prior to 2006, before the mass migration to the Cloud, if you wanted to store content for your company you needed to build your own expensive and highly available storage platform that was large enough to store all your existing content with enough growth headroom for your business. AWS launched to help eliminate this model by renting their physical computing and storage infrastructure.
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) led the market by offering a scalable and resilient tool for storing unlimited amounts of data without building it yourself. It could be integrated into any application but there was one catch: you couldn’t use any existing standard such as WebDAV, FTP or SMB: your application needed to interface with Amazon’s bespoke S3 API.
Fast forward to 2020 and the storage provider landscape has become highly competitive with many providers capable of providing petabyte (and exabyte) scale content storage at extremely low cost-per-gigabyte. However, Amazon S3 has remained a dominant player despite heavy competition and not being the most cost-effective player.
The broad adoption of the S3 API by developers in their codebases and internal systems has transformed the S3 API into what WebDAV promised us to be: de facto standard HTTP File Storage API.
Engineering costs of changing storage providers
With many code bases and legacy applications being entrenched in the S3 API, the process to switch to a more cost-effective storage provider is not so easy. Companies need to consider the cost of engineer time programming a new storage API while also physically moving their data.
This engineering overhead has led many storage providers to natively support the S3 API, leveling the playing field and allowing companies to focus on picking the most cost-effective provider.
#bandwidth alliance #backblaze #s3 #cloudflare workers #api
