It’s great finally having object storage available on the fly.io platform! But I’ve been wondering about the cost structure. As Tigris is built on top of fly.io, how can they offer object storage at $0.02/GB, when the underlying block storage provided by fly.io costs $0.15/GB?
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This is total speculation on my part but I’d assume:
a) They are going to store a lot of data and so wouldn’t pay the “list” price.
b) They charge their users a fee per request. It’s small but if a customer gets millions of requests, those do add up.
a) Yes, Tigris is very likely not paying the list price 
But here we’re talking about 7.5x less. I suppose it’s hard to justify such a discount, except if the underlying hardware is different, optimized for object storage instead of block storage?
b) Yes, but the per request fees also have to cover the computing cost. But perhaps there is some margin here that pays for storage as well. But then that would mean losing money on “sleeping” data that is never accessed, only stored?
I’m curious about this from a technical perspective, but also in terms of how sustainable is this, if I’m going to use Tigris as a potential customer and user.
Tigris stores small objects on our volumes, and larger objects on other cloud storage. Over time, we’ll work with them to optimize the storage costs. Probably by shipping different types of storage.
Also note that S3 is much cheaper than EBS. Most clouds are trending towards fast block devices and abstracting away slower storage behind other APIs.
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Exactly. That’s precisely why Tigris being available on fly.io is a good news, because it becomes possible to store BLOBs at $0.02/GB instead $0.15/GB
Are you thinking of offering something like “storage optimized” machines with locally-attached disks (instead of network-attached) and HDD (instead of SSD), that could be used for the storage nodes of a service like Tigris?
All of our disks are locally attached, we have no network storage. But generally yeah, other kinds of disks or storage models are things we’ll think about over time.
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