Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 47 posts.

Infrastructure & DevOps
2012
17

Why Tarsnap doesn't use Glacier

On the surface, Tarsnap sounds like the perfect use case for Glacier. Out of every TB of data stored on Tarsnap, in any given month approximately 100 GB of data will be deleted, while only 33 GB of data will be downloaded; in other words, Tarsnap is very much a "write once, read maybe " storage system. Tarsnap's…

22

Tarsnap outage post-mortem

When the Tarsnap EC2 instance came back online about an hour later, I found that the abrupt loss of power had resulted in filesystem corruption. As I explained in a blog post in December 2008, Tarsnap stores all user data in Amazon S3, but keeps metadata cached in EC2 . While I could not see any evidence that the…

26

Why Tarsnap won't use DynamoDB

As I've blogged about before, the Tarsnap server code synthesizes a log-structured filesystem on top of Amazon S3 . As a result of this design, for each block of data stored on Tarsnap, the server code needs to keep track of two key-value pairs: First, to map a 64-bit machine number and a 256-bit block ID to a 64-bit…

28

A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB

Amazon’s recent release of DynamoDB, a database whose name is inspired by Dynamo, the key-value database the distributed datastore they’ve been running in production for a good five to six years now. I think it’s great they’ve finally done it, though from my obverservations, there’s little resemblance of what the…