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I wish these block storage services gave you some idea of failure rate/durability and availability. Amazon publishes some rough volume loss rates but not even Google tells you what kind of durability to expect out of a persistent volume. They all say they are tri-replicated, which semi-implies highly durable storage. What about availability?

Lastly, I'd love to know if DO/Linode have custom rolled their solution or are using Ceph or something similar. Not that I don't trust them, but they aren't recruiting the same engineers as Google.




Based on their open jobs listings, DigitalOcean is using Ceph. I really hope (for everyone's sake) that Linode didn't roll their own solution.

As someone who runs ~100 Ceph clusters at multi-petabyte scale, publishing availability and durability SLAs is not an easy task, however not impossible either.


Hey there - Tory Kulick here from Linode. Our Block Storage solution leverages Ceph.


Since they just started offering it, Linode probably doesn't have accurate statistics to share, and most people can't correctly interpret very small probabilities anyway. They'd probably be better off saying something like "you should assume that each volume will fail at some point in its life".


They have been offering it since June, FWIW. And it is worth knowing the order of magnitude of expected failure rates compared to just running against the local SSD.


Its probably custom to be 100% honest. The only host I know offering that stuff out of the box using open source is OVH using OpenStack.


DO is using Ceph.

OVH is using Ceph as well (that talks to OpenStack) as far as I know.




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