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Launch HN: Regatta Storage (YC F24) – Turn S3 into a local-like, POSIX cloud FS

573 points huntaub | 1 comments | 18 Nov 24 16:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source

Hey HN, I’m Hunter the founder of Regatta Storage (https://regattastorage.com). Regatta Storage is a new cloud file system that provides unlimited pay-as-you-go capacity, local-like performance, and automatic synchronization to S3-compatible storage. For example, you can use Regatta to instantly access massive data sets in S3 with Spark, Pytorch, or pandas without paying for large, local disks or waiting for the data to download.

Check out an overview of how the service works here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh1q5p7E4JY, and you can try it for free at https://regattastorage.com after signing up for an account. We wanted to let you try it without an account, but we figured that “Hacker News shares a file system and S3 bucket” wouldn’t be the best experience for the community.

I built Regatta after spending nearly a decade building and operating at-scale cloud storage at places like Amazon’s Elastic File System (EFS) and Netflix. During my 8 years at EFS, I learned a lot about how teams thought about their storage usage. Users frequently told me that they loved how simple and scalable EFS was, and -- like S3 -- they didn’t have to guess how much capacity they needed up front.

When I got to Netflix, I was surprised that there wasn’t more usage of EFS. If you looked around, it seemed like a natural fit. Every application needed a POSIX file system. Lots of applications had unclear or spikey storage needs. Often, developers wanted their storage to last beyond the lifetime of an individual instance or container. In fact, if you looked across all Netflix applications, some ridiculous amount of money was being spent on empty storage space because each of these local drives had to be overprovisioned for potential usage.

However, in many cases, EFS wasn’t the perfect choice for these workloads. Moving workloads from local disks to NFS often encountered performance issues. Further, applications which treated their local disks as ephemeral would have to manually “clean up” left over data in a persistent storage system.

At this point, I realized that there was a missing solution in the cloud storage market which wasn’t being filled by either block or file storage, and I decided to build Regatta.

Regatta is a pay-as-you-go cloud file system that automatically expands with your application. Because it automatically synchronizes with S3 using native file formats, you can connect it to existing data sets and use recently written file data directly from S3. When data isn’t actively being used, it’s removed from the Regatta cache, so you only pay for the backing S3 storage. Finally, we’re developing a custom file protocol which allows us to achieve local-like performance for small-file workloads and Lustre-like scale-out performance for distributed data jobs.

Under the hood, customers mount a Regatta file system by connecting to our fleet of caching instances over NFSv3 (soon, our custom protocol). Our instances then connect to the customer’s S3 bucket on the backend, and provide sub-millisecond cached-read and write performance. This durable cache allows us to provide a strongly consistent, efficient view of the file system to all connected file clients. We can perform challenging operations (like directory renaming) quickly and durably, while they asynchronously propagate to the S3 bucket.

We’re excited to see users share our vision for Regatta. We have teams who are using us to build totally serverless Jupyter notebook servers for their AI researchers who prefer to upload and share data using the S3 web UI. We have teams who are using us as a distributed caching layer on top of S3 for low-latency access to common files. We have teams who are replacing their thin-provisioned Ceph boot volumes with Regatta for significant savings. We can’t wait to see what other things people will build and we hope you’ll give us a try at regattastorage.com.

We’d love to get any early feedback from the community, ideas for future direction, or experiences in this space. I’ll be in the comments for the next few hours to respond!

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boulos ◴[19 Nov 24 18:31 UTC] No.42186660[source]▶
I love this space, and I have tried and failed to get cloud providers to work on it directly :). We could not get the Avere folks to admit that their block-based thing on object store was a mistake, but they were also the only real game in town.

That said, I feel like writeback caching is a bit ... risky? That is, you aren't treating the object store as the source of truth. If your caching layer goes down after a write is ack'ed but before it's "replicated" to S3, people lose their data, right?

I think you'll end up wanting to offer customers the ability to do strongly-consistent writes (and cache invalidation). You'll also likely end up wanting to add operator control for "oh and don't cache these, just pass through to the backing store" (e.g., some final output that isn't intended to get reused anytime soon).

Finally, don't sleep on NFSv4.1! It ticks a bunch of compliance boxes for various industries, and then they will pay you :). Supporting FUSE is great for folks who can do it, but you'd want them to start by just pointing their NFS client at you, then "upgrading" to FUSE for better performance.

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1. huntaub ◴[19 Nov 24 18:44 UTC] No.42186783[source]▶
> That is, you aren't treating the object store as the source of truth. If your caching layer goes down after a write is ack'ed but before it's "replicated" to S3, people lose their data, right?

This is exactly why we're building our caching layer to be highly-durable, like S3 itself. We will make sure that the data in the cache is safe, even if servers go down. This is what gives us the confidence to respond to the client before the data is in S3. The big difference between the data living in our cache and the data living in S3 is cost and performance, not necessarily durability.

> I think you'll end up wanting to offer customers the ability to do strongly-consistent writes (and cache invalidation). You'll also likely end up wanting to add operator control for "oh and don't cache these, just pass through to the backing store" (e.g., some final output that isn't intended to get reused anytime soon).

I think this is exactly right. I think that storage systems are too often too hands off about the data (oh, give us the bytes and we will store them for you). I believe that there are gains to be had by asking the users to tell you more about what they're doing. If you have a directory which is only used to read files and a directory which is only used to write files, then you probably want to have different cache strategies for those directories? I believe we can deliver this with good enough UX for most people to use.

> Finally, don't sleep on NFSv4.1! It ticks a bunch of compliance boxes for various industries, and then they will pay you :). Supporting FUSE is great for folks who can do it, but you'd want them to start by just pointing their NFS client at you, then "upgrading" to FUSE for better performance.

I certainly don't, and this is why we are supporting NFSv3 right now. That's not going away any time soon. We want to offer something that's highly compatible with the industry at large today (NFS-based, we can talk specifics about whether or not that should be v3 or v4) and then something that is high-performance for the early adopters who can use something like FUSE. I think that both things are required to get the breadth of customers that we're looking for.