Tag: Cloud Block Store

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Strong Consistency in S3 and Cloud Block Store

From my armchair in the past few weeks, I have been watching the myriad of announcements at re:Invent by AWS and a few things caught my eye (well a lot of things did, but a few in particular to storage).

The first thing to note was the change in the consistency model in S3. Up until now, consistency was “eventual” within S3 for certain operations like changes to a file, and there are a ton of posts that do a great job of explaining this. One is below:

https://dhruvsharma-50981.medium.com/s3-eventual-data-consistency-model-issues-and-tackling-them-47093365a595

Google “S3 eventual consistency” and you will find tons of examples.

At a high level, when modifying or deleting objects the change may not be immediately reflected. So on an immediate subsequent read, you may not get what you wrote. For busy environments with high change rates/modifications this could lead to corruption. So you needed to understand the behavior and build to or around it.

At re:Invent, AWS announced that strong consistency is now supported for S3 operations:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-update-strong-read-after-write-consistency/

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/consistency/

What you write is what you get. Fantastic!

So what does this have to do with Cloud Block Store? Read on.

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Can Pure make cloud storage better?

Cloud Block Store is now GA! About a year ago, we announced our intentions–to bring Purity (the OS for the FlashArray) to AWS. I wrote a post about it here:

https://www.codyhosterman.com/2018/11/announcing-pure-storage-cloud-block-store-for-aws/

In the past 10 months I have been pretty focused on learning AWS. Not just how to use it, but more importantly, how others are using it. It has been a fun ride–definitely already incorporated some of my learnings into my solution work for on-premises integration and have some cool stuff coming. A lot of my work has been of course on using it, how to deploy EC2, how to deploy VMware Cloud on AWS, managing S3, CloudFormations, IAM, SSM, using the billions of other services in AWS. But much of my focus has been on listening to what people have seen, learned, and want to do with public cloud. AWS and the like have had a decent amount of runway now, so there have certainly been some lessons learned.

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Announcing: Pure Storage Cloud Block Store for AWS

One of the fundamental features of the operating environment running on the FlashArray™ is the fact that the same software can run on many different hardware implementation of the FlashArray. This is one of the reasons that we can offer hardware Non-Disruptive Upgrades or when we introduce new features (even things as expansive as VVols) we can support it on older hardware. We support VVols going back to the FA 420-an array that was introduced before I joined Pure Storage® 4.5 years ago.

Furthermore, we have been having increasing conversations around the public cloud. Not just running applications in it, but moving data to and from it. DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) is an increasingly talked about use case. VMware Cloud in AWS is getting more and more attention at VMworld, and in general. We, at Pure get it. Will everything go to public cloud? No. Certainly not. Will everything stay on-premises? Also, of course not. Some customers will. Some will not at all. Many (most?) will use both in some capacity. So enabling data mobility is important.

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