Backblaze Developer Newsletter—August 2023

Our monthly newsletter brings technical articles, events, and news to developers working with Backblaze B2 Cloud Object Storage.

Hi there!   Welcome to our August 2023 Backblaze Developer Newsletter, bringing you, as always, news, articles, and events from the world of Backblaze B2.   One great thing about working with the Backblaze technical community is that we interact with such a wide variety of hands-on technical professionals. IT administrators take advantage of Backblaze B2 for backing up servers and archiving data. Media and entertainment professionals enjoy cost-effective storage for their massive collections of images, audio, and video. Developers build applications with industry-standard tooling that integrate seamlessly with Backblaze B2's S3-compatible API.   In the past few months, we've also seen an increasing number of data engineers and developers storing structured and semi-structured data in Backblaze B2, creating and accessing it with tools such as the Hadoop software framework, the DuckDB in-process database management system, and, our personal favorite, the Trino SQL query engine. This month, we feature a pair of articles that explain how to access data in Backblaze B2 from Snowflake's cloud-based data storage and analytics platform. Now Snowflake customers can write queries that span data sets stored within the Snowflake platform and any number of cloud storage options, including Backblaze B2. Check out our first item below. How are you using Backblaze B2? We always love to hear about topics that you'd like to see us cover here in the newsletter, on the blog, or in the documentation. Email your suggestions to us at evangelism@backblaze.com (or just reply to this email). Query Data Stored in Backblaze B2 From Snowflake Although Snowflake was founded as an online data warehouse, it's expanded to cover a range of cloud-based data storage and analytics use cases, including data lakes. Snowflake customers can configure external tables to query data stored in data lakes located in a range of cloud storage providers outside the Snowflake platform. Last month, Snowflake added support for external tables located in S3-compatible cloud object storage, prompting our Evangelism team to write a pair of articles on accessing data stored in Backblaze B2 from Snowflake. Whether you're looking to Export Data from Snowflake to Backblaze B2 or Use Snowflake to Query Existing Data in Backblaze B2, we've got you covered.   Learn More → Just the Tech, Please! Announcing the Backblaze Tech Lab Blog The Backblaze customer base spans the gamut, from decidedly non-technical folks enjoying hassle-free computer backup, to IT professionals backing up enterprise servers, to developers building innovative applications around Backblaze B2. Similarly, the Backblaze blog has always presented a wide range of content, from visualizing a yottabyte, to recovering from and preventing a ransomware attack, to contemplating the retirement of the Python global interpreter lock. This month, we added a new Tech Lab category to the blog, collecting our more developer-focused articles onto a single page, complete with its own RSS feed, naturally. Blog articles are designed to take our step-by-step Docs instructions and contextualize them with the why and how of their impact on your projects. Now it's easy to jump straight to the semi-colons and curly braces, and we're always up for a lively discussion in the comments.   Check It Out → How to Use Cloud Replication to Automate Environments Cloud Replication, as its name suggests, allows you to replicate data between Backblaze B2 Buckets. Many Backblaze customers replicate data with the goal of maintaining a copy for security, compliance, or continuity purposes, or of bringing data closer to distant teams or customers for faster access. This blog post looks at a third use case for replication: creating testing and staging environments as part of the software development process. Learn why you might want to leverage replication for system and acceptance testing, how to decide on a replication strategy, and how to create replication rules to fit your requirements.   Read the Blog → At Last: Access a Custom Endpoint From AWS SDKs Without Code Changes Since the launch of the Simple Storage Service as Amazon's first web service back in 2006, the S3 API has become a de facto standard for object storage, both in the cloud and on premises. We added an S3-compatible API in May 2020, making Backblaze B2 accessible to the wide ecosystem of developers and applications that had grown up over the years. Although it's always been straightforward to retarget applications using the AWS SDKs from Amazon S3 to Backblaze B2, it's usually required at least one minor code change: overriding the default Amazon S3 endpoint with the Backblaze B2 equivalent.   Last month, a new section appeared in the AWS SDKs and Tools Reference Guide, describing "service-specific endpoints"—the ability to configure the service endpoint via an environment variable or the shared AWS config file. At the time of writing, only the current versions of the AWS SDKs for .NET, Ruby and PHP, as well as the AWS CLI, support the new endpoint configuration, but we expect support to roll out across the remaining SDKs over the coming months. We're already enjoying not having to include --endpoint-url 'https://s3.us-west-004.backblazeb2.com' every time we use the AWS CLI! Learn more in the AWS documentation, and look out for a post on the Backblaze Tech Lab blog with details on how to take advantage of service-specific endpoints.   Learn More → Upcoming Events Catch up with us online or in person in the next few weeks:   DeveloperWeek CloudX: August 15–16, San Mateo, CA. August 22–23, online. This year, DeveloperWeek's cloud computing conference will be visiting Backblaze's hometown of San Mateo! Visit us at the Backblaze booth and attend Product Leader Bala Gangisetty's session, "Storing Smarter, Not Harder: Object Storage Best Practices" at 2:30 p.m. PT on August 15 (in person) and at the same time on August 22 (online).   Inside Object Lock: Ransomware Protection for Developers and IT Professionals: 10:00 am PT, August 31, online. Object Lock allows Backblaze B2 customers to make data immutable, preventing files from being changed or deleted until a given date. Off-the-shelf products, such as backup software, leverage Object Lock to protect data that is stored in Backblaze B2 from threats like ransomware, or for regulatory compliance. In this live webinar, Pat Patterson, Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze, will present a deeper look at Object Lock. Pat will explain Object Lock's governance, compliance, and legal hold modes, how to enable Object Lock at the bucket and file level, and how to take advantage of Object Lock in your own applications. Register now to join the live presentation or receive a link to the recording after the broadcast.   QCon San Francisco: October 2–4, San Francisco, CA. This fall, our Evangelism team will be sponsoring QCon's San Francisco conference. Stop by our booth, say hi, and pick up some fun swag!   Know anyone who might like this newsletter? Forward this email to them so they can subscribe! Backblaze, 500 Ben Franklin Ct, San Mateo, CA Unsubscribe Manage preferences