I've recently done a moderately complex hybrid setup that used DO in conjunction with S3 and Route53.

My biggest takeaway from the experience was how much the simplicity and speed of DO's dashboard interface stood out - the AWS web interface just felt laggy by comparison. I know it sounds like a poor reason to favour a platform but DO was just a simple pleasure to navigate and use.

I think the takeaway here is that AWS is designed to be managed via its API and that shows when one tries to use the GUI (Source: Had a similar experience).

If you're managing your infrastructure via GUI it's probably not moderately complex.

I would be extremely happy with DO if they put out an S3 competitor. Right now, most of my servers are on DO, the only things I need AWS for is a single windows server to run some windows only software, and S3 to store my database backups.

Object Storage is currently in internal-company-beta =]

After that we will be doing a customer beta followed by a GA release scheduled for Q3.

=]]

That makes me really happy to hear. Is there any good way to keep up on potential up-coming features you are working on? I feel like that would be good knowledge to have when making decisions.

We don't have a formal system for that but we do announce customer early request betas. Sometimes they are invite only, other times we open them more broadly. In those cases where it is more broad it's usually featured on our homepage and then it's on a first come, first serve basis in terms of getting access and limited by the number of invitations that we are accepting.

It's a bit of a fluid process as it depends on the type of service, product, feature, we are rolling out.

Any chance I can get in on the beta for this? I've done the Load balancer and block storage beta? <username>@gmail.com

We will make sure to add you once the beta is available.

Throwaway, but I would bet money that you'll see this pretty soon on DO - hang in there!

This is one of the big reasons I come to HN...insider intel.

Yes. Filestorage is an essential piece of most apps we build and keeps us tied to Amazon (or other competitors like Microsoft or Google who have storage.)

There's also Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html

B2 is nice, but the single location is something of a deal-breaker as far as being an S3 replacement.

Can you explain your use case? I know a lot of businesses solely using us-east-1

Well, for starters, all customers that are not in us-east. Such as US west coast, Europe or Asia.

Besides latency, data protection issues also become a problem when you cross borders. My employer's (SAP) cloud platform advertises as a unique selling point that they have data centers in a wide variety of locations, so that a customer's data never has to leave their jurisdiction (which is important e.g. for government and its contractors).

And that's before we get to high-availability setups. Remember how AWS us-east was down just a few months ago?

A business needs their S3 component highly available. If they don't have a DR plan in place, and a massive S3 outage (like the one that happened a couple months ago) occurs, they're fucked.

My specific use case isn't really that interesting. Many use cases where a single AZ or region failure shouldn't stop business exist.

It is very, very rare from my professional ops/devops experience to see an org built to survive a region outage; the tools are there, the money/business case is not.

It doesn't have to be HA and replication. Sharding by customer would mean a region outage takes out only 1/N customers. That wouldn't have a higher cost, other than whatever dev effort is needed to work that way.

it's always smart to store your backups on another service anyway for any doomsday scenarios

We use Google Cloud Storage Coldline as our backup file storage. Synced using rclone (rsync for cloud) nightly. The cost is next to nothing. IIRC, ~3TB stored for $25/mo.

Oh even if DO offered an S3 competitor, i'd still have them going to S3 as well. I'd just have them also going to DO's solution, so restores would be MUCH faster, and wouldn't cost an arm and a leg.

And to double the single-points of failure? Now your "stuff" is only alive if both the virtual machine(s) are up, and the object-store is accessible!

What do you mean? It's not like if your object store becomes unavailable your database sending it's backups there will suddenly stop working.

Indeed, but if you're hosting user-images on S3 and they go away your site is broken.

That might not be a big deal, or it might mean your site is 100% broken. I can't guess, but I'd assume since you went to the effort to setup a store you need it in some way.

(No backups? Of a database? That's one power-cut, or hardware failure away from complete data loss too!)

Feels like a losing battle. AWS codestar is essentially the DO/Heroku killer.

And yet I instantly prefer DO to AWS because of the experience and good customer support and developer relations. Takes almost no time getting up to speed, while AWS feels like a better fit for large enterprise, which I'm not in that world. Codestar all they want, it's still AWS.

I don't necessarily think so. There's still a reasonable market for things like DO/Heroku, AWS inherently isn't trying to make it easier for people. I just wish I could have their image support and interface with dedicated hardware.