Early February 2019

Arriving in January 2019, object storage was ready to go into general availability. We were now confident. Yes, we weren’t a product with five 9 availability. But we didn’t have the same budget or size. We needed to move forward to acquire more experience.

Inside the team, we named object storage SIS. Short for Scaleway Infinite Storage. It was a name that we liked a lot. However the marketing team had other ideas. We kept the name for internal use only. Similarly, for block storage, inside the team, we used SBS. Scaleway Block Storage.

We were now only missing two things. The billing and the console interface. The first one was making good progress with Marian (a) and Alexandre (b).

As for the console, it was now ready. I remember the big debates we had with the frontend team. For us, team storage, we thought the interface was useless and unnecessary. We thought the rule to have a mandatory interface was stupid. Users of Object Storage had tools they did not need another interface yet.

On their side, we were the only product who was not using GRPC. They would not integrate unless we added a S3<>GRPC bridge. Which we refused to do. We didn’t want to maintain two distinct API for the same product. The choice we had made to be S3 compliant was great for users but a source of conflict inside Scaleway. That would not be the last time we would argue on that.

The discussion went on and on. Eventually we agreed to implement some helpers and they agreed to use the AWS SDK for S3 support. It was Albert (c) that worked on the new service for that integration.

With that compromise, the support for object storage was added in the console. We added a few additional bits to handle the CORS properly and other small details. With only billing left to be finished we announced general availability. We expected to finish the billing parts within no more than a few weeks. We went live with the product.

In February 2019, we were the first product in general availability. We had accomplished that in a little over a year after the Pivot. But, as usual, we just went forward. We didn’t really celebrate. I don’t remember celebrating. I focused on missing components, the bugs we still had, and the next steps.

We had already ordered more hardware and it was being prepared in DC5 for our next region launch. It was an achievement. A true one. Yet it didn’t feel like one.

But now, we needed to collect money.

​
​

(1) https://x.com/Scaleway/status/1094898497143361537​

(a) Marian Gappa, part time intern then, now DevOps Consultant

(b) Alexandre Merle, then DevOps now Developper

(c) Albert Le Batteux, then DevOps Storage, now Founder & Freelance

If you have missed it, you can read the previous episode here​

To pair with :

• Go - Public Service Broadcast
• John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon by John M. Logsdon