Cloud empire: Meet the Rebel Alliance
I've been a fan and a user of Backblaze's all-you-can-store back up service -- and their bootstrapped business model -- for several years. So when Gleb Budman, co-founder and CEO told me last week that they were partnering with Packet and Server Central to create an alternative to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the like, I was interested. Very interested.
Who are these guys?
AWS, Azure, and Google have the top-of-mind footprint, but this is a tens of billions a year industry. Which means there are other folks bringing joy to the party.
Backblaze started as a cloud backup company, but they've grown. They claim "cloud storage that's astonishingly easy and low-cost. 500 Petabytes stored and over 25 billion files recovered."
You may have seen their data on drive reliability. Sure, it's an attention getting device, but no one else is offering that data, so I'm in.
Packet is focused on bare metal devops.
Blazing fast dedicated servers, but with the automation and flexibility of the cloud. 8 minute deploys, cloud-init, and common drivers.
Server Central has a strong focus on cloud, disaster recovery, managed services, and colocation.
Connecting the dots
OK, what does this mean for you? It's simple: Backblaze's B2 storage can be directly connected to Packet and Server Central compute servers, and you get low latency and free data transfers.
This eliminates the costs that the Big Guys charge to move your data off their servers, which can be several pennies per gigabyte. In a world of Big Data, those pennies add up, fast.
The Storage Bits take
I'm most familiar with Backblaze, and their pricing for their B2 storage is a fraction of AWS. So the fact that you can now use their cost-effective storage with very flexible compute resources is a very good thing.
Learn more at Backblaze.
Courteous comments welcome, of course. Nope, I've never taken money from Backblaze. I just like what they do and how they've done it.