Backblaze is now a Terraform provider

[mattjaynes]

If you'll be using B2 for live production data, a couple points:

First, B2's pricing is pretty amazing, especially compared to S3 and similar competitors: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html

Second, be aware those savings come with some downsides. The major one for us has been their maintenance window every Thursday from 2:00-3:00pm Pacific Time. Usually there's no outage, but sometimes there is. There's no warning - it's just down sometimes during that window. So, if uptime is important for your data, consider the cost of also implementing a fallback solution to cover your production use during those maintenance windows. https://www.backblaze.com/scheduled-maintenance.html

[qw3rty01]

Also keep in mind all the data is in a single datacenter, so if something like OVH happens to backblaze, you'll probably lose the data

I mainly only use them for backups instead of production data

EDIT: As of 2019 there are multiple datacenters, but it doesn't seem like the data is stored redundantly across them

[busymom0]

A limitation I ran across when using B2 was that their pre-defined url generation doesn't allow you to set file-size limits nor does it allow you to set the file name in the pre-defined url. It simply gives you a url to upload it to. So if you are using b2 for storage for lets say image uploads from browser, some malicious user has the ability to modify the network request with whatever file name or file size they want. Next thing you know, you have a 5gb sized image uploads happening....

This pretty much prevents me from using B2 for now.

[vishnumohandas]

B2 claims to offer 99.9% uptime[1], and seems to have SLAs[2] similar to that of AWS S3[3].

[1]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-storage-durability-vs-a...

[2]: https://www.backblaze.com/company/sla.html

[3]: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/sla/

[tedmiston]

What a strange time for a company with lots of US customers to schedule a maintenance window.

[preommr]

Digital Ocean has spaces with unlimited uploads, 250gB + (0.02/gb), 1TB of outbound transfer all at $5/mo.

That seems way cheaper than this.

For backups and large, long term storage, AWS has Glacier, that's really really cheap.

[truetraveller]

Ouch. Does B2 Cloud actually go down during this time. That's a major show-stopper. Was actually counting on B2. Not sure anymore.

[truetraveller]

Side question: Apart from this maintenance window, is B2 Cloud reliable? I've heard of problems with the S3 API. Is the "native" API more stable? Would love to know your insight, it will potentially save me a lot of time!

[fukmbas]

Lol who has a maintenance window in the middle of the day?

[nikisweeting]

I love B2's free ingress and egress when you use CloudFlare, they utterly destroy the competition on price.

But my true dream would be for backblaze to someday offer ZFS as a service.

I want to `zfs send -i my_pool@2020-03-11 | b2zfs recv some_bucket_id`, then be able to view my snapshots and files within in the backblaze web UI, and restore with `b2zfs send -i some_bucket_id/my_pool@2020-03-11 | zfs recv my_pool`.

You can already mount B2 as a FUSE filesystem with something like ExpanDrive, then write ZFS raw file vdevs to the B2 FUSE mount, but it's horrifically slow and probably too janky for any real use.

[ptomato]

rsync.net's zfs as a service is really great for that, though a bit more expensive than b2 is.

[mhio]

Without b2 adding anything zfs specific, that should be possible with a regular large file upload if you can deal with each upload part being buffered in a file/memory locally before upload.

[kgog]

maybe you need borg with borgbase.

[philsnow]

The wording is a little clunky; the "is" in "Backblaze is now a Terraform provider" makes me think that BB is competing with Terraform Cloud.

"Backblaze now has a Terraform provider" or "Backblaze released a Terraform provider" makes more sense to me.

[OJFord]

But unfortunately plugins cannot provide remote backends, and it's a little clunky to use the S3 one:

https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/27304

[javajosh]

It's interesting because it feels like a small turf war. The "Amazon Provider Team" wants to own the s3 provider backend, and you want to make it pluggable. Is this to avoid an explicit "b2" provider? I can see how it might be confusing to use terraform and see an s3 provider and then have it...not use s3. :)

[renewiltord]

Very cool! Great job, guys.

Do you use a similar technique to https://poweruser.blog/embedding-python-in-go-338c0399f3d5 to embed the Python SDK?

Also, was there a reason it's not against the B2 API? Not a judgment, just curious about the design tradeoffs in a professional-talking-to-professional sense.

[AYBABTME]

That design choice prevents their provider from working with official Terraform container images. They should make the API calls directly in Go, it's just weird to do it via Python... They have very few resources exposed on their API so it's not like writing a Go client would be all that hard.

[vbsteven]

Terraform is an amazing tool and it’s always great to see more infrastructure providers jumping on the bandwagon.

[atYevP]

Yev from Backblaze here -> Yea, it's pretty great! They're a great tool and we're glad to be involved!

[rattray]

I sure wish this post had included a few code snippets, just to make it extra-clear what using Backblaze through Terraform might look like.

[solatic]

> Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) tool

Maybe it was in the beginning, but Terraform is far more powerful than that now. Terraform is a monad that neatly separates pure declarative configuration from the I/O (side effects) that are factored out into providers. Terraform used at its most powerful is not limited to infrastructure, it also sets up the platforms and applications running on that infrastructure for you, by separating the configuration of the platforms and applications from the generic API calls that apply that configuration. Terraform's dependency graph ensures that the calls are made in the right order, no matter if they are made to infrastructure APIs, platform APIs, or APIs belonging to layers further up the stack

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

For large downloads, does BB support the Range header. If the user is on a connection that that is not suitable for long downloads, could the Range header be used to download a large file in several parts.

[0xbkt]

They support byte serving.

[nhoughto]

Popped in to say backblaze built out a tf provider at our request and they were great about it! Got a quick early build out to test, GA build a few months later and are very responsive to feedback. Pleasure to deal with

[majormjr]

I was just looking at this new Terraform provider yesterday how timely. Nice to see the quickstart guide this will be helpful for managing the buckets and application keys.

[atYevP]

Yev from Backblaze here -> That's great! Glad the quick-start makes it simple.

[satyrnein]

Anyone have any experience with the Backblaze compute partners? I want to put data up on B2, but then I still need to do things with it.

[snicker7]

Terraform is great, but I wish more cloud providers had Guix/Nix integration.

[ethnt]

You could use NixOps[0] for Nix but I'm not sure you can directly compare Terraform and Guix/Nix? My set up involves Terraform for infrastructure and Nix for provisioning, and it's working for me so far.

[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixops

[aseipp]

I think this too, but at the same time the reality is a tool like Terraform is really complicated to implement well, and, importantly, it always has to work. All the time. There are really high standards for this, and in my personal experience, alternative solutions like NixOps don't quite stack up in reliability or broad utility versus Terraform. The design is good in theory, but it needs just a huge amount of work to be trusted.

For the most part, I provision things with Terraform and then instantiate the servers with NixOS/Nix itself, and this mostly works. For bonus points you can use Nix to generate the HCL that Terraform reads in (because Nix can write JSON, and HCL is just JSON in a trenchcoat) if you want to put some veneer on it.

[emptysongglass]

You can deploy and manage NixOS on Big Cloud using Terraform: https://nix.dev/tutorials/deploying-nixos-using-terraform.ht...

[CameronNemo]

Are there any providers that to have such integration? I have only lightly used nix. Having a hard time understanding what a cloud provider integration would look like.