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Was at the Google Next 2025 conference, and they've unveiled a zonal bucket version of GCS and what seems to be a gPRC interface over Google Colossus for Rapid Storage.

(This was posted last night with https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/whats-new-wit... above. We've changed the URL to the product-specific article.)

7 days agoby dang

Very cool! This makes Google the only major cloud that has low-latency single-zone object storage, standard regional object storage, and transparently-replicated dual-region object storage - all with the same API.

For infra systems, this is great: code against the GCS API, and let the user choose the cost/latency/durability tradeoffs that make sense for their use case.

7 days agoby akshayshah

FYI this was unveiled at the 2025 Google Next conference, and they're apparently unveiling a gRPC client for Rapid Storage, which appears to be a very thin wrapper over Colossus itself, as this is just zonal storage.

8 days agoby alobrah

This could actually speed up some of my scientific computing (in some cases, data localization/delocalization is an important part of overall instance run-time). I will be interested to try it.

8 days agoby carbocation

Had to go back to the classic microservices video as I was pretty sure they used Colossus but it was actually Galactus & Omega Star.

7 days agoby steveBK123

Glad to see the zonal object store take off. Such massive bandwidth speed will re define data analytics where 99% of all queries able to run on a single node faster than what distributed compute can offer.

7 days agoby bushbaba

This link makes so much more sense than the previous link did.

SSDs with high random I/o speeds are a significant contributor to the advantage. I think 20m writes per second are likely distributed over a network of drives to make that kind of speed possible.

7 days agoby nashashmi

I want chubby as a service so I can throw etcd and zookeeper in the trash.

7 days agoby __turbobrew__

Similar to S3 express one zone

8 days agoby acstorage

For some reason, text highlight didn't work, so here's the text-highlighted link: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/whats-new-wit...

8 days agoby alobrah

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/anywhere-cache

7 days agoby EE84M3i

Is it like PureStorage?

7 days agoby devops000

There's a detailed blog post about Rapid Storage now available, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43645309

(I work on Google storage)

7 days agoby leg

Super interesting! Rapid Storage especially, very useful, but that first line:

"Today's innovation isn't born in a lab or at a drafting board; it's built on the bedrock of AI infrastructure. "

Uhh..No. Even as an AI developer I can tell that is some AI Comms person tripping over.

7 days agoby pj_mukh

Everyone needs to learn to use a single, unique, unambiguous URL for new product announcements like this.

Google aren't the only company that consistently mess this up, but given how they built a 1.95 trillion company on top of crawling URLs on the web they really should have an internal culture that values giving things unique URLs!

[I had to learn this lesson myself: I used to blog "weeknotes" every week or two where I'd bundle all of my project announcements together and it sucked not being able to link to them as individual posts]

7 days agoby simonw

Hats off to whoever convinced management that selling Colossus via cloud was Artificial Intelligence. Bravo.

8 days agoby hiddencost

Reading the press release about the "Hypercomputer" and I can't tell what part of this is real and what part is marketing.

They say it comes in two configuration, 256 chips or 9,216 chips. They also say that the maximal configuration of 9,216 chips delivers 24x the compute power of the world's largest supercomputer (which they say is called El Capitan). They say that this comes to 42.6 exaFLOPs.

This implies that the 9,216 chip configuration doesn't actually exist in any form in reality, or else it would now be the world's largest supercomputer (by flops) by a huge margin.

Am I massively misunderstanding what the claims being made are about the TPU and the 42.6 exaFLOPs? I feel like this would be much bigger news if this was fully legit.

Edit: The flops being benchmarked are not the same as regular supercomputer flops.

7 days agoby zifpanachr23

Terrifyingly complicated and buzzword packed. I really don't know what to make of any of this or what it does, and I work with AI applications in my day job.

I'm guessing the $300 of Google Cloud credit offered in this webpage wouldn't go very far using any of this stuff?

7 days agoby davedx

Like with any other new Google product, better wait a few years to see if it sticks before investing in its usage. In most cases, you'd be better off searching for an alternative from the start.

7 days agoby miroljub

If you want object storage faster than S3 Express One Zone or GCP Rapid Storage without the zonal limitation check out ACS: https://acceleratedcloudstorage.com

You can bring data in and out of the GPU quickly and improve utilization.

7 days agoby acstorage