Suppose money is no object and your team is willing to deal with a bit of complexity. If you need faster or accelerated access to your data, you can pay for that on Amazon, but you can’t with Backblaze B2 or Wasabi.If you have something that you need to store (e.g., for compliance reasons), but you will never access it, AWS’s Glacier Deep will be a lot cheaper than Backblaze B2 or Wasabi.While it’s a feature of Wasabi and Backblaze B2 to have simple and/or single-tier pricing, this can also be a bug depending on the use case. Only sometimes do they have multiple zones within a region. If your business case requires your data to survive a catastrophic event that affects the single data center your data is stored in, Backblaze B2 and Wasabi might not be a good fit. While smaller vendors can replicate your data as well, they generally do so within a single zone (i.e., a single data center). More than one has tiers that will replicate your data inter-zonally and inter-regionally several times over by default. The Big 3 has far more regions and zones to replicate your data across. Not necessarily a “gotcha,” but vendors like Backblaze don’t always meet the specific compliance requirements of some industries. One storage class (or two if you count Reserved Capacity Storage), which provides simplicity at the cost of flexibility.Fewer features, like eventing, which can impact development time and integration with other cloud services.Fewer regions, which can impact data geo-redundancy.The “gotchas” shared by both Wasabi and Backblaze B2 fall into four buckets: Gotchas Specific To Wasabi and Backblaze B2 Azure Blob Storage has a point-in-time restore feature that can be a life-saver if data becomes corrupted.Amazon S3 has a robust (and largely unmatched) storage analytics suite called S3 Storage Lens to get visibility into your security profile and opportunities to increase efficiency.Google Cloud Storage supports 3rd party billing to share the costs of accessing data with the organizations or users that access your data.In addition, some of these low-cost providers don’t have some of the features you might not think you need now but could come in very handy later: Robust Identity and Access Management (IAM).In contrast, others lack the management features you and/or your compliance and security officers are undoubtedly used to, including: Need to meet a compliance requirement, like HIPAA? Or need to meet standard requirements for access management (i.e., IAM)? Unfortunately, several low-cost object storage providers don’t score well in terms of meeting compliance requirements. While the pricing of the storage-only providers is attractive, they come with “gotchas” of their own: In addition, like Digital Ocean, Cloudflare R2, and Linode, some package together data transfer with standard storage in their pricing or offer it for free. The specialized providers tend to have better data transfer fees. On the other hand, the specialized (i.e., storage-only) providers are much much cheaper, sometimes at under 30% of the cost of Amazon S3 for standard storage, like: There’s a bucket of broad-based but lower-cost providers that mete out at about 50-90% the cost of Amazon S3 ($21-23/TB/mo) for standard storage. If you’re lucky in this case, your engineers have a habit of wrapping code to make it agnostic. ![]() If an engineer enabled accelerated code on your storage and then has to swap that out, then it’s not codeless migration to any one of these specialized providers, which in turn impacts your TCO. ![]() For example, S3 Transfer Acceleration won’t be compatible with another provider because AWS uses proprietary algorithms to reroute data rapidly within AWS. ![]() Several specialized services related to S3 would be hard to run without the AWS backbone (i.e., where you pull from or how you transit data). Generally, the most significant differences between Amazon’s native API and other implementations revolve around concurrency and data transfer. Others don’t have a specialized endpoint, so they try to make their native endpoint look as much as possible like Amazon S3’s API. For example, some vendors put up endpoints that can take S3-like requests and convert them to native requests for their platform. Several standard implementations of the S3 API have significant differences between them in compliance with the S3 standard. To be fair, most vendors have done a decent job implementing the core components of the S3 API, but it’s imperative to know if they cover what you need that isn’t core. For example, looking at one specific aspect of the S3 API, Amazon S3 has plenty of settings on the S3 Multi-part Upload configuration that we find are rarely consistent with anyone else’s implementation of the S3 API.
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