Backblaze Rate Limiting Policy for Consistent Performance

16 pointsposted 8 months ago
by taubek

10 Comments

atYevP

8 months ago

Yev from Backblaze here -> we've updated the post to make it more clear. This will ONLY affect about 5% of the Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage population with < 10TB of data. See below for additional information:

-> This policy is limited to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage usage. Backblaze Computer Backup usage is not within the scope of this policy.

-> Customers storing 10TB or below will initially be provisioned for uploads up to 3,000 requests per minute and 800 megabits per second, and for downloads up to 1,200 requests per minute and 200 megabits per second, all per account. Other API operations may also be limited to keep traffic flowing, but again, this won’t be noticeable to most customers.

-> Customers storing more than 10TB, including all sales assisted customers whom we’ve supported during implementation and/or renewal, will experience no change at this time.

-> Traffic analysis and engineering is a dynamic activity, so we’ll likely revise limits over time in response to evolving usage patterns, improvements we roll out, and, of course, customer feedback. We will announce significant changes here on the blog.

Hope that clears things up and we have additional documentation on our API Documentation pages: https://www.backblaze.com/apidocs.

telgareith

8 months ago

Suicide. 25MB/s download, and they're not even reasonably cheaper than the competition.

StillBored

8 months ago

I agree, that is slower than the internet connection at my house, which could just host a few TB of spinning rust attached via USB faster.

Before I moved to backblaze I was half seriously lining up a few friends to share a similar setup that would self replicate between our houses and provide a simple restic interface.

Besides, they do charge for egress over a certain threshold so it seems they are also capping how much they can make from some customers. I get that there are probably a few problematic ones, but it seems that the business should be able to figure which ones are causing problems and solve it that way, rather than punishing the smaller customers using them as a storage depot. Customers whichh go years with a low level of upload+transactions under the theory that should the need arise the entire repo can be pulled back down at a few hundred MB/sec in a manner of hours.

EricE

8 months ago

"and they're not even reasonably cheaper than the competition."

Such as?

seekbeak

8 months ago

Just emailed support and they've said this is already implemented, and you can only increase your limits if you commit to 20TB of storage.

Our production web app can easily makes more than 20 requests for images per second on the initial page load for a single user. B2s new 20 requests per second cap means that it will just take one person viewing to cause anyone else also trying to view the app at that second to get an empty white screen. Cloudflare cache will only mitigate this so much.

Anyone got non Amazon suggestions to migrate to ASAP?

atYevP

8 months ago

Yev here -> if you have a ticket number I'd love to know it b/c that's not accurate and I want to make sure support is trained properly. If you're using more than 10TB of storage you'll experience no change. We've updated our blog post w/ more explicit information (apologies for confusion on this one).

seekbeak

8 months ago

Sure thing: #1084672

The exact wording was: "If you are interested in increasing these limits, we do offer a higher threshold to customers who commit to a minimum of 20TB of our B2 Reserve Capacity-Based Storage service through one of our reseller partners."

atYevP

7 months ago

Yev here - I confirmed that that's definitely a PATH towards not hitting those limits, but no reason to pay for 20TB if you're not using that much (especially if you're not using a reseller). I'm working with the team to change some of that messaging. The TL/DR is that most people will NOT see a change (we did a lot of analysis on the back end to see whether the throttling of <10TB customers would affect their behavior and most won't see a thing). This has been in production since Wednesday, so if you're not seeing any changes, your use-case is likely unaffected.

thejazzman

8 months ago

Cloudflare R2 seems designed for migrating off of someone else

seekbeak

8 months ago

Funny you mention that, I am creating a test bucket with R2 at this very moment.