Splitting light Season 2 Episode 09 Redundancy is key If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Around February 2018, as we moved forward and validated individual hardware pieces, we now had to bring everything together. This is where my experience in the lab had a lot of impact, coupled with the experience we had gathered maintaining the existing storage products. What most software engineers fail to realize when working with hardware is that the time flows...
10 days ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 08 Compiling knowledge If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe To be able to use OpenIO and offer it as a public facing product we had to amass quite a large amount of knowledge. We had to understand how it worked in detail. We had to understand the hardware requirements as well as how we wanted to make it filled and cabled. We had to understand how Scaleway’s information system worked and how we would connect to it. Skunk Works:...
17 days ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 07 Future growth If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe To bring object storage the fastest and safest way would be to use existing software. At the time we reevaluated the solutions that had been selected beforehand. There were three of them. Ceph, an open source industry standard, OpenIO a provider of an open source object storage, and Scality a provider of a closed source product. There were multiple criteria to take into...
24 days ago • 3 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 06 Object storage If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Object storage was our first priority. Many existing and future products depended on having an object storage product. We looked at the state of the art. There were a few competing protocols. Amazon S3 was the oldest but there was also Blackblaze B2, Openstack SWIFT, Google GCS and lastly Azure Blob storage. When we looked into how object storage was used, where it was used...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 05 Mind haze If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Cafeteria (1) Those first few months are blurry in my memory. Because of my context, I thought at the time that it was because I wasn’t a good engineer. Now, I understand that I was in a learning phase. I recognize these phases better now. It was the same feeling as when I had started doing hardware. Not really understanding everything. Everything seemed to blurry precisely...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 04 First product sunset If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Slipper boxes (1) As we learned more and more about the existing products and how to maintain them online, we learned about different components and how many spare parts we had in stock. A question you could ask is why did we keep these products online? We could’ve pulled a Google and just killed them all to only have the products we were expected to build. Except, we...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 03 Remote hands If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe Even before we could do anything other than look at what object and block storage were, we had to assure the continuity of the existing products. That meant getting the people who used to take care of them to give us all the information they knew and what we needed to continue running them. One thing helped us very much. Both Folays and Loic had worked on some of the...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 02 Birth of team storage 💾 If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe The five of us had been tasked to build two new products in the short term. Object and block storage. What we had missed was that we would pick-up all the existing storage products as well. At the time, in the cloud department there had already been two tries at object storage, the first one had been a public offering based on RiakCS, a now defunct database. The...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Splitting light Season 2 Episode 01 51 avenue Iena If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe November 2017, the cloud industry was now booming. AWS was 11 years old, Azure was 9 years old, GCP was 6 years old and Oracle Cloud was now 2 years old. For me, the adventure continued but on a different wavelength. I had jumped energy level, and it was a whole new light. The storage team was created. There were initially five of us. Me, the lead engineer, Théo the manager...
2 months ago • 3 min read