napkin-math VS mountpoint-s3

Most production storage systems/databases built on top of S3 spend a significant amount of effort building an SSD/memory caching tier to make them performant enough for production (e.g. on top of RocksDB). But it's not easy to keep it in sync with blob...

Even with the cache, the cold query latency lower-bound to S3 is subject to ~50ms roundtrips [0]. To build a performant system, you have to tightly control roundtrips. S3 Express changes that equation dramatically, as S3 Express approaches HDD random read speeds (single-digit ms), so we can build production systems that don't need an SSD cache—just the zero-copy, deserialized in-memory cache.

Many systems will probably continue to have an SSD cache (~100 us random reads), but now MVPs can be built without it, and cold query latency goes down dramatically. That's a big deal

We're currently building a vector database on top of object storage, so this is extremely timely for us... I hope GCS ships this ASAP. [1]

[0]: https://github.com/sirupsen/napkin-math

Trying to estimate performance using some napkin math based on this: https://github.com/sirupsen/napkin-math

So napkin maths time. Typical cross-world bog-standard network speeds for a single TCP channel of ~25MiBps. A single HEADERS+RST pair is likely < 128 bytes (40 for the HEADERS + whatever payload, and 32 for the RST). So 8 pairs per K, 8K pairs per MiB, 200K pairs per 25MiB...

Yes, sequential I/O bandwidth is closing the gap to memory. [1] The I/O pattern to watch out for, and the biggest reason why e.g. databases do careful caching to memory, is that _random_ I/O is still dreadfully slow. I/O bandwidth is brilliant, but latency is still disappointing compared to memory.

[1]: https://github.com/sirupsen/napkin-math

https://github.com/sirupsen/napkin-math (memorize these)

... or does "S3 file system" mean https://github.com/awslabs/mountpoint-s3 - a Rust project by AWS Labs that provides "a simple, high-throughput file client for mounting an Amazon S3 bucket as a local file system" ?

Looks like support for S3 Express was merged in with version 1.30 just a few hours ago https://github.com/awslabs/mountpoint-s3/pull/642

mountpoint-s3 is AWS’ first party solution for mounting s3 buckets as file systems: https://github.com/awslabs/mountpoint-s3

Haven’t used it but it looks cool, if a bit immature.

FROM rust:1.68.0 as Build RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \ clang\ cmake \ curl \ fuse \ git \ libfuse-dev \ pkg-config \ && apt-get clean \ && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* \ && git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/awslabs/mountpoint-s3.git \ && cd mountpoint-s3 \ && cargo build --release FROM debian:bullseye-slim RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \ ca-certificates \ libfuse-dev \ sudo \ && apt-get clean \ && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* COPY --from=build /mountpoint-s3/target/release/mount-s3 /usr/local/bin/mount-s3 RUN chmod 777 /usr/local/bin/mount-s3 RUN useradd -ms /bin/bash mount-s3-user \ && echo '%sudo ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL' >> /etc/sudoers \ && adduser mount-s3-user sudo USER mount-s3-user

This might be useful with a MinIO server, although not directly supported