March 23, 2020

Behind The Scenes Of The Linode Object Storage Service

35 minutes

Summary

There are a number of platforms available for object storage, including self-managed open source projects. But what goes on behind the scenes of the companies that run these systems at scale so you don’t have to? In this episode Will Smith shares the journey that he and his team at Linode recently completed to bring a fast and reliable S3 compatible object storage to production for your benefit. He discusses the challenges of running object storage for public usage, some of the interesting ways that it was stress tested internally, and the lessons that he learned along the way.

Announcements

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Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Will Smith about his work on building object storage for the Linode cloud platform

Interview

Introduction

How did you get involved in the area of data management?

Can you start by giving an overview of the current state of your object storage product?

What was the motivating factor for building and managing your own object storage system rather than building an integration with another offering such as Wasabi or Backblaze?

What is the scale and scope of usage that you had to design for?

Can you describe how your platform is implemented?

What was your criteria for deciding whether to use an available platform such as Ceph or MinIO vs building your own from scratch?

How have your initial assumptions about the operability and maintainability of your installation been challenged or updated since it has been released to the public?

What have been the biggest challenges that you have faced in designing and deploying a system that can meet the scale and reliability requirements of Linode?

What are the most important capabilities for the underlying hardware that you are running on?

What supporting systems and tools are you using to manage the availability and durability of your object storage?

How did you approach the rollout of Linode’s object storage to gain the confidence that you needed to feel comfortable with full scale usage?

What are some of the benefits that you have gained internally at Linode from having an object storage system available to your product teams?

What are your thoughts on the state of the S3 API as a de facto standard for object storage?

What is your main focus now that object storage is being rolled out to more data centers?

Contact Info

Dorthu on GitHub

dorthu22 on Twitter

Website

Parting Question

From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

Linode Object Storage

Xen Hypervisor

KVM (Linux Kernel Virtual Machine)

Linode API V4

Ceph Distributed Filesystem

Podcast Episode

Wasabi

Backblaze

MinIO

CERN Ceph Scaling Paper

RADOS Gateway

OpenResty

Lua

Prometheus

Linode Managed Kubernetes

Ceph Swift Protocol

Ceph Bug Tracker

Linode Dashboard Application Source Code

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

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By Tobias Macey

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