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Render announces object storage service at TechCrunch Disrupt
It was a big day for startup Render, which participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield today. It also announced some upgrades to its managed cloud platform.
First of all, it announced the ability to spin up object storage in the cloud, while greatly simplifying the tasks associated with adding storage. CEO and founder Anurag Goel says that the storage option is something customers have been requesting, and as with their other services, they handle a lot of the heavy lifting for them.
“One of the things that our users want us to do next is to build out object storage. Even though they can use things like Amazon S3 and other cloud storage options, they know that Render is going to be easier for them to use. So they really want object storage, and they want everything in one place,” Goel explained.
If you want to do that today without Render, you would have to spin up a virtual machine in the cloud, attach the storage, set up backup schedules and take care of all of these other associated tasks, and what Render is doing with Render Disk is stripping that all away and managing the process for them.
While the startup was at it, it also developed a concept called infrastructure as code. This allows developers to define their infrastructure requirements in a YAML file. When the developer sends the file to GitHub, Render can build the infrastructure for the customer on the fly based on the contents of this file.
Finally, they are offering a one-click launch to customers. This could come in handy for companies that are offering free trials or open-source tools to enable users to launch their applications with a single click from GitHub and it will load all of the required files.
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Why AWS gains big storage efficiencies with E8 acquisition
AWS is already the clear market leader in the cloud infrastructure market, but it’s never been an organization that rests on its past successes. Whether it’s a flurry of new product announcements and enhancements every year, or making strategic acquisitions.
When it bought Israeli storage startup E8 yesterday, it might have felt like a minor move on its face, but AWS was looking, as it always does, to find an edge and reduce the costs of operations in its data centers. It was also very likely looking forward to the next phase of cloud computing. Reports have pegged the deal at between $50 and $60 million.
What E8 gives AWS for relatively cheap money is highly advanced storage capabilities, says Steve McDowell, senior storage analyst at Moor Research and Strategy. “E8 built a system that delivers extremely high-performance/low-latency flash (and Optane) in a shared-storage environment,” McDowell told TechCrunch.
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Three years after moving off AWS, Dropbox infrastructure continues to evolve
Conventional wisdom would suggest that you close your data centers and move to the cloud, not the other way around, but in 2016 Dropbox undertook the opposite journey. It (mostly) ended its long-time relationship with AWS and built its own data centers.
Of course, that same conventional wisdom would say, it’s going to get prohibitively expensive and more complicated to keep this up. But Dropbox still believes it made the right decision and has found innovative ways to keep costs down.
Akhil Gupta, VP of Engineering at Dropbox, says that when Dropbox decided to build its own data centers, it realized that as a massive file storage service, it needed control over certain aspects of the underlying hardware that was difficult for AWS to provide, especially in 2016 when Dropbox began making the transition.
“Public cloud by design is trying to work with multiple workloads, customers and use cases and it has to optimize for the lowest common denominator. When you have the scale of Dropbox, it was entirely possible to do what we did,” Gupta explained.
Alone again, naturally
One of the key challenges of trying to manage your own data centers, or build a private cloud where you still act like a cloud company in a private context, is that it’s difficult to innovate and scale the way the public cloud companies do, especially AWS. Dropbox looked at the landscape and decided it would be better off doing just that, and Gupta says even with a small team — the original team was just 30 people — it’s been able to keep innovating.
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Egnyte brings native G Suite file support to its platform
Egnyte announced today that customers can now store G Suite files inside its storage, security and governance platform. This builds on the support the company previously had for Office 365 documents.
Egnyte CEO and co-founder Vineet Jain says that while many enterprise customers have seen the value of a collaborative office suite like G Suite, they might have stayed away because of compliance concerns (whether that was warranted or not).
He said that Google has been working on an API for some time that allows companies like Egnyte to decouple G Suite documents from Google Drive. Previously, if you wanted to use G Suite, you no choice but to store the documents in Google Drive.
Jain acknowledges that the actual integration is pretty much the same as his competitors because Google determined the features. In fact, Box and Dropbox announced similar capabilities over the last year, but he believes his company has some differentiating features on its platform.
“I honestly would be hard pressed to tell you this is different than what Box or Dropbox is doing, but when you look at the overall context of what we’re doing…I think our advanced governance features are a game changer,” Jain told TechCrunch.
What that means is that G Suite customers can open a document and get the same editing experience as they would get were they inside Google Drive, while getting all the compliance capabilities built into Egnyte via Egnyte Protect. What’s more, they can store the files wherever they like, whether that’s in Egnyte itself, an on-premises file store or any cloud storage option that Egnyte supports, for that matter.
G Suite documents stored on the Egnyte platform
Long before it was commonplace, Egnyte tried to differentiate itself from a crowded market by being a hybrid play where files can live on-premises or in the cloud. It’s a common way of looking at cloud strategy now, but it wasn’t always the case.
Jain has always emphasized a disciplined approach to growing the company, and it has grown to 15,000 customers and 600 employees over 11 years in business. He won’t share exact revenue, but says the company is generating “multi-millions in revenue” each month.
He has been talking about an IPO for some time, and that remains a goal for the company. In a recent letter to employees that Egnyte shared with TechCrunch, Jain put it this way. “Our leadership team, including our board members, have always looked forward to an IPO as an interim milestone — and that has not changed. However, we now believe this company has the ability to not only be a unicorn but to be a multi-billion dollar company in the long-term. This is a mindset that we all need to have moving forward,” he wrote.
Egnyte was founded in 2007 and has raised more than $137 million, according to Crunchbase data.
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Google launches its coldest storage service yet
At its Cloud Next conference, Google today launched a new archival cold storage service. This new service, which doesn’t seem to have a fancy name, will complement the company’s existing Nearline and Coldline services for storing vast amounts of infrequently used data at an affordable low cost.
The new archive class takes this one step further, though. It’s cheap, with prices starting at $0.0012 per gigabyte and month. That’s $1.23 per terabyte and month.
The new service will become available later this year.
What makes Google cold storage different from the likes of AWS S3 Glacier, for example, is that the data is immediately available, without millisecond latency. Glacier and similar service typically make you wait a significant amount of time before the data can be used. Indeed, in a thinly veiled swipe at AWS, Google directors of product management Dominic Preuss and Dave Nettleton note that “unlike tape and other glacially slow equivalents, we have taken an approach that eliminates the need for a separate retrieval process and provides immediate, low-latency access to your content.”
To put that into context, a gigabyte stored in AWS Glacier will set you back $0.004 per month. AWS offers another option, though: AWS Glacier Deep Archive. This service recently went live, at the cost of $0.00099 per gigabyte and month, though with significantly longer retrieval times.
Google’s new object storage service uses the same APIs as Google’s other storage classes and Google promises that the data is always redundantly stored across availability zones, with eleven 9’s of annual durability.
In a press conference ahead of today’s official announcement, Preuss noted that this service mostly a replacement for on-premise tape backups, but now that many enterprises try to keep as much data as they can to then later train their machine learning models, for example, the amounts of fresh data that needs to be stored for the long term continues to increase rapidly, too.
With low latency and the promise of high availability, there obviously has to be a drawback here, otherwise Google wouldn’t (and couldn’t) offer this service at this price. “Just like when you’re going from our standard [storage] class to Nearline or Coldline, there’s a committed amount of time that you have to remain in that class,” Preuss explained. “So basically, to get a lower price you are committing to keep the data in the Google Cloud Storage bucket for a period of time.”
Correction: a previous version of the post said that AWS Glacier Deep Archive wasn’t available yet when it actually went live two weeks ago. We changed the post to reflect this.
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Humio raises $9M Series A for its real-time log analysis platform
Humio, a startup that provides a real-time log analysis platform for on-premises and cloud infrastructures, today announced that it has raised a $9 million Series A round led by Accel. It previously raised its seed round from WestHill and Trifork.
The company, which has offices in San Francisco, the U.K. and Denmark, tells me that it saw a 13x increase in its annual revenue in 2018. Current customers include Bloomberg, Microsoft and Netlify .
“We are experiencing a fundamental shift in how companies build, manage and run their systems,” said Humio CEO Geeta Schmidt. “This shift is driven by the urgency to adopt cloud-based and microservice-driven application architectures for faster development cycles, and dealing with sophisticated security threats. These customer requirements demand a next-generation logging solution that can provide live system observability and efficiently store the massive amounts of log data they are generating.”
To offer them this solution, Humio raised this round with an eye toward fulfilling the demand for its service, expanding its research and development teams and moving into more markets across the globe.
As Schmidt also noted, many organizations are rather frustrated by the log management and analytics solutions they currently have in place. “Common frustrations we hear are that legacy tools are too slow — on ingestion, searches and visualizations — with complex and costly licensing models,” she said. “Ops teams want to focus on operations — not building, running and maintaining their log management platform.”
To build this next-generation analysis tool, Humio built its own time series database engine to ingest the data, with open-source tools like Scala, Elm and Kafka in the backend. As data enters the pipeline, it’s pushed through live searches and then stored for later queries. As Humio VP of Engineering Christian Hvitved tells me, though, running ad-hoc queries is the exception, and most users only do so when they encounter bugs or a DDoS attack.
The query language used for the live filters is also pretty straightforward. That was a conscious decision, Hvitved said. “If it’s too hard, then users don’t ask the question,” he said. “We’re inspired by the Unix philosophy of using pipes, so in Humio, larger searches are built by combining smaller searches with pipes. This is very familiar to developers and operations people since it is how they are used to using their terminal.”
Humio charges its customers based on how much data they want to ingest and for how long they want to store it. Pricing starts at $200 per month for 30 days of data retention and 2 GB of ingested data.
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They scaled YouTube — now they’ll shard everyone with PlanetScale
When the former CTOs of YouTube, Facebook and Dropbox seed fund a database startup, you know there’s something special going on under the hood. Jiten Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane saved YouTube from a scalability nightmare by inventing and open-sourcing Vitess, a brilliant relational data storage system. But in the decade since working there, the pair have been inundated with requests from tech companies desperate for help building the operational scaffolding needed to actually integrate Vitess.
So today the pair are revealing their new startup PlanetScale that makes it easy to build multi-cloud databases that handle enormous amounts of information without locking customers into Amazon, Google or Microsoft’s infrastructure. Battle-tested at YouTube, the technology could allow startups to fret less about their backend and focus more on their unique value proposition. “Now they don’t have to reinvent the wheel” Vaidya tells me. “A lot of companies facing this scaling problem end up solving it badly in-house and now there’s a way to solve that problem by using us to help.”
PlanetScale quietly raised a $3 million seed round in April, led by SignalFire and joined by a who’s who of engineering luminaries. They include YouTube co-founder and CTO Steve Chen, Quora CEO and former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, former Dropbox CTO Aditya Agarwal, PayPal and Affirm co-founder Max Levchin, MuleSoft co-founder and CTO Ross Mason, Google director of engineering Parisa Tabriz and Facebook’s first female engineer and South Park Commons founder Ruchi Sanghvi. If anyone could foresee the need for Vitess implementation services, it’s these leaders, who’ve dealt with scaling headaches at tech’s top companies.
But how can a scrappy startup challenge the tech juggernauts for cloud supremacy? First, by actually working with them. The PlanetScale beta that’s now launching lets companies spin up Vitess clusters on its database-as-a-service, their own through a licensing deal, or on AWS with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure coming shortly. Once these integrations with the tech giants are established, PlanetScale clients can use it as an interface for a multi-cloud setup where they could keep their data master copies on AWS US-West with replicas on Google Cloud in Ireland and elsewhere. That protects companies from becoming dependent on one provider and then getting stuck with price hikes or service problems.
PlanetScale also promises to uphold the principles that undergirded Vitess. “It’s our value that we will keep everything in the query pack completely open source so none of our customers ever have to worry about lock-in” Vaidya says.
PlanetScale co-founders (from left): Jiten Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane
Battle-tested, YouTube-approved
He and Sougoumarane met 25 years ago while at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Back in 1993 they worked at pioneering database company Informix together before it flamed out. Sougoumarane was eventually hired by Elon Musk as an early engineer for X.com before it got acquired by PayPal, and then left for YouTube. Vaidya was working at Google and the pair were reunited when it bought YouTube and Sougoumarane pulled him on to the team.
“YouTube was growing really quickly and the relationship database they were using with MySQL was sort of falling apart at the seams,” Vaidya recalls. Adding more CPU and memory to the database infra wasn’t cutting it, so the team created Vitess. The horizontal scaling sharding middleware for MySQL let users segment their database to reduce memory usage while still being able to rapidly run operations. YouTube has smoothly ridden that infrastructure to 1.8 billion users ever since.
“Sugu and Mike Solomon invented and made Vitess open source right from the beginning since 2010 because they knew the scaling problem wasn’t just for YouTube, and they’ll be at other companies five or 10 years later trying to solve the same problem,” Vaidya explains. That proved true, and now top apps like Square and HubSpot run entirely on Vitess, with Slack now 30 percent onboard.
Vaidya left YouTube in 2012 and became the lead engineer at Endorse, which got acquired by Dropbox, where he worked for four years. But in the meantime, the engineering community strayed toward MongoDB-style non-relational databases, which Vaidya considers inferior. He sees indexing issues and says that if the system hiccups during an operation, data can become inconsistent — a big problem for banking and commerce apps. “We think horizontally scaled relationship databases are more elegant and are something enterprises really need.
Database legends reunite
Fed up with the engineering heresy, a year ago Vaidya committed to creating PlanetScale. It’s composed of four core offerings: professional training in Vitess, on-demand support for open-source Vitess users, Vitess database-as-a-service on PlanetScale’s servers and software licensing for clients that want to run Vitess on premises or through other cloud providers. It lets companies re-shard their databases on the fly to relocate user data to comply with regulations like GDPR, safely migrate from other systems without major codebase changes, make on-demand changes and run on Kubernetes.
The PlanetScale team
PlanetScale’s customers now include Indonesian e-commerce giant Bukalapak, and it’s helping Booking.com, GitHub and New Relic migrate to open-source Vitess. Growth is suddenly ramping up due to inbound inquiries. Last month around when Square Cash became the No. 1 app, its engineering team published a blog post extolling the virtues of Vitess. Now everyone’s seeking help with Vitess sharding, and PlanetScale is waiting with open arms. “Jiten and Sugu are legends and know firsthand what companies require to be successful in this booming data landscape,” says Ilya Kirnos, founding partner and CTO of SignalFire.
The big cloud providers are trying to adapt to the relational database trend, with Google’s Cloud Spanner and Cloud SQL, and Amazon’s AWS SQL and AWS Aurora. Their huge networks and marketing war chests could pose a threat. But Vaidya insists that while it might be easy to get data into these systems, it can be a pain to get it out. PlanetScale is designed to give them freedom of optionality through its multi-cloud functionality so their eggs aren’t all in one basket.
Finding product market fit is tough enough. Trying to suddenly scale a popular app while also dealing with all the other challenges of growing a company can drive founders crazy. But if it’s good enough for YouTube, startups can trust PlanetScale to make databases one less thing they have to worry about.
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AWS tries to lure Windows users with Amazon FSx for Windows File Server
Amazon has had storage options for Linux file servers for some time, but it recognizes that a number of companies still use Windows file servers, and they are not content to cede that market to Microsoft. Today the company announced Amazon FSx for Windows File Server to provide a fully compatible Windows option.
“You get a native Windows file system backed by fully-managed Windows file servers, accessible via the widely adopted SMB (Server Message Block) protocol. Built on SSD storage, Amazon FSx for Windows File Server delivers the throughput, IOPS, and consistent sub-millisecond performance that you (and your Windows applications) expect,” AWS’s Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post introducing the new feature.
That means if you use this service, you have a first-class Windows system with all of the compatibility with Windows services that you would expect, such as Active Directory and Windows Explorer.
AWS CEO Andy Jassy introduced the new feature today at AWS re:Invent, the company’s customer conference going on in Las Vegas this week. He said that even though Windows File Server usage is diminishing as more IT pros turn to Linux, there are still a fair number of customers who want a Windows-compatible system and they wanted to provide a service for them to move their Windows files to the cloud.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it provides a path for Microsoft customers to use AWS instead of turning to Azure for these workloads. Companies undertaking a multi-cloud strategy should like having a fully compatible option.
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Dropbox expands Paper into planning tool with timelines
Dropbox has been building out Paper, its document-driven collaboration tool since it was first announced in 2015, slowly but surely layering on more functionality. Today, it added a timeline feature, pushing beyond collaboration into a light-weight project planning tool.
Dropbox has been hearing that customers really need a way to plan with Paper that was lacking. “That pain—the pain of coordinating all those moving pieces—is one we’re taking on today with our new timelines feature in Dropbox Paper,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new feature.
As you would expect with such a tool, it enables you to build a timeline with milestones, but being built into Paper, you can assign team members to each milestone and add notes with additional information including links to related documents.
You can also embed a To-do lists for the person assigned to a task right in the timeline to help them complete the given task, giving a single point of access for all the people assigned to a project
Gif: Dropbox
“Features like to-dos, @mentions, and due dates give team members easy ways to coordinate projects with each other. Timelines take these capabilities one step further, letting any team member create a clean visual representation of what’s happening when—and who’s responsible,” Dropbox wrote in the blog post announcement.
Dropbox has recognized it cannot live as simply a content storage tool. It needs to expand beyond that into collaboration and coordination around that content, and that’s what Dropbox Paper has been about. By adding timelines, the company is looking to expand that capability even further.
Alan Lepofsky, who covers the “future of work” for Constellation Research sees Paper as part of the changing face of collaboration tools. “I refer to the new breed of content creation tools as digital canvases. These apps simplify the user experience of integrating content from multiple sources. They are evolving the word-processor paradigm,” Lepofsky told TechCrunch.
It’s probably not going to replace a project manager’s full-blown planning tools any time soon, but it at least the potential to be a useful adjunct for the Paper arsenal to allow customers to continue to find ways to extract value from the content they store in Dropbox.
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Google introduces dual-region storage buckets to simplify data redundancy
Google is playing catch-up in the cloud, and as such it wants to provide flexibility to differentiate itself from AWS and Microsoft. Today, the company announced a couple of new options to help separate it from the cloud storage pack.
Storage may seem stodgy, but it’s a primary building block for many cloud applications. Before you can build an application you need the data that will drive it, and that’s where the storage component comes into play.
One of the issues companies have as they move data to the cloud is making sure it stays close to the application when it’s needed to reduce latency. Customers also require redundancy in the event of a catastrophic failure, but still need access with low latency. The latter has been a hard problem to solve until today when Google introduced a new dual-regional storage option.
As Google described it in the blog post announcing the new feature, “With this new option, you write to a single dual-regional bucket without having to manually copy data between primary and secondary locations. No replication tool is needed to do this and there are no network charges associated with replicating the data, which means less overhead for you storage administrators out there. In the event of a region failure, we transparently handle the failover and ensure continuity for your users and applications accessing data in Cloud Storage.”
This allows companies to have redundancy with low latency, while controlling where it goes without having to manually move it should the need arise.
Knowing what you’re paying
Companies don’t always require instant access to data, and Google (and other cloud vendors) offer a variety of storage options, making it cheaper to store and retrieve archived data. As of today, Google is offering a clear way to determine costs, based on customer storage choice types. While it might not seem revolutionary to let customers know what they are paying, Dominic Preuss, Google’s director of product management says it hasn’t always been a simple matter to calculate these kinds of costs in the cloud. Google decided to simplify it by clearly outlining the costs for medium (Nearline) and long-term (Coldline) storage across multiple regions.
As Google describes it, “With multi-regional Nearline and Coldline storage, you can access your data with millisecond latency, it’s distributed redundantly across a multi-region (U.S., EU or Asia), and you pay archival prices. This is helpful when you have data that won’t be accessed very often, but still needs to be protected with geographically dispersed copies, like media archives or regulated content. It also simplifies management.”
Under the new plan, you can select the type of storage you need, the kind of regional coverage you want and you can see exactly what you are paying.
Google Cloud storage pricing options. Chart: Google
Each of these new storage services has been designed to provide additional options for Google Cloud customers, giving them more transparency around pricing and flexibility and control over storage types, regions and the way they deal with redundancy across data stores.
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