Measuring the performance of a storage solution isn’t hard, but understanding the measured values is. IOPS, throughput, and latency are related to each other, but how? In this blog post I try to explain how they are related and what you should know to really get the most out of your performance test. IOPS, throughput and latency are all very important metrics. HDDs (spinning or rotating disks), SSDs (I mean SATA or SAS connected ones), and NVMe devices (connected through some PCIe one way or the other), have very different performance profiles. Simplyblock’s storage engine uses NVMe disks an ..read more

This interview is part of the Simplyblock Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube, Spotify, iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Samsung Podcasts, and our show site. In this installment of the podcast, we talked to Nicolas Fränkel (X/Twitter) from API7.ai, the creator of Apache APISIX, a high-performance open-source API gateway, discusses the significance of choosing tools that fit your needs, and emphasizes making choices based on what works best for your requirements. Chris Engelbert: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the next episode of simplyblock's Cloud Commute podcast, your weekly ..read more

This interview is part of the Simplyblock Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube, Spotify, iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Samsung Podcasts, and our show site. In this installment of the podcast, we talked to Steven Sklar (his private blog, X/Twitter) from QuestDB, a company producing a time series database for large IoT, metrics, observability and other time-component data sets, talks about how they implemented their database offering, from building their own operator to how storage is handled. Chris Engelbert: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of simpleblock's Clo ..read more

If you have services running in the AWS, you’ll eventually need block storage to store data. Services like Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage) provide block storage to be used in your EC2 instances, Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Services), and others. While providing an easy to use, and fast option, there are several limitations you’ll eventually run into. Amazon EBS: The Limitations When building out a new system, quick iterations are generally key. That includes fast turnovers to test ideas, or validate approaches. Using out of the box services, like Amazon EBS helps with these requirements ..read more

Storage virtualization, as a concept, has been around about 60 years now. However, it became more prominent and practical with the advancement of computing technologies in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in particular with the emergence of storage area networks (SANs) and network-attached storage (NAS). As these systems became more prevalent, storage virtualization technologies started to take advantage of these architectures, offering more scalable and flexible solutions for managing your storage resources. Storage Virtualization Architectures The idea of storage virtualization abstracts awa ..read more

This interview is part of the Simplyblock Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube, Spotify, iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Samsung Podcasts, and our show site. In this installment, we're talking to Rich Kenny from Interact, an environmental consultancy company, about how their machine-learning based technology helps customers to minimize their carbon footprint, as well as optimizing infrastructure cost. He sheds light on their innovative approach to optimize data center performance for sustainability. Chris Engelbert: Hello, folks! Great to have you here for our first episode of the Cl ..read more

Kubernetes has pretty much become synonymous with container orchestration, and all competition is either assimilated (or rewritten to be based on Kubernetes, see Openshift), or basically disappeared into the void (sorry Nomad). Does that mean that development will slow down now? Or is it the beginning of something even bigger? Maybe Kubernetes is on the verge of becoming a generic name, just like Kleenex, or maybe a verb like “to google”. Years ago, somebody asked me in an interview what I think of Docker, and if I see a future for containerization. At the time my answer was quick and easy. F ..read more

This interview is part of the Simplyblock Cloud Commute Podcast, available on Youtube, Spotify, iTunes/Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Samsung Podcasts, and our show site. In this installment, we're talking to Álvaro Hernández Tortosa from OnGress, a company creating StackGres, a PostgreSQL operator to help operate PostgreSQL in a Kubernetes environment, as well as the Postgres ecosystem and why it is so hard to create a production-grade Postgres service. Chris Engelbert: Welcome to this week's episode of Cloud Commute podcast by simplyblock. Today, I have another incredible guest, a really good f ..read more

In the vast landscape of cloud computing, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) stands out as a crucial component for storage in AWS’ Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), as well as other AWS services. As businesses increasingly migrate to the cloud, or build newer applications as cloud-native services, understanding the cloud spending becomes essential for cost-effective operations. With Amazon EBS often making up 50% or more of the cloud cost, it is important to grasp the intricacies of Amazon EBS spending, explore the key concepts, and find the main factors that influence cost, as we ..read more

The debate over the optimal storage solution has been ongoing. There's no denying that local instance storage on AWS brings remarkable cost-performance ratios—20 times better performance cost and 10 times lower access latency than EBS. It's a powerhouse for quick, ephemeral storage needs. Recently, Vantage posted an article titled "Don't use EBS for Cloud Native Services". While we, in principle, agree with this problem statement, we think that there is a better solution that using local NVMe SSD storage on AWS as an alternative to EBS. The Local Storage Advantage Local storage on AWS excels ..read more