Backblaze Developer Newsletter—September 2024

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

Hi there!   Backblaze Tech Day, our annual virtual event featuring a series of deep dives on new and exciting ways to use B2 Cloud Storage, is a little earlier this year: Tuesday, September 24, at 10:00 a.m. PT. See below for all the details and a link to register.   We also bring you a bumper crop of technical blog posts this month: a tour of the Backblaze open source projects on GitHub, a guide to the latest enhancements in the Backblaze B2 CLI, an overview of software containers, and much more! If there's something you'd like to see here in the newsletter, on the blog, or in the documentation, tell us! Email your suggestions, and any other feedback, to us at evangelism@backblaze.com (or just reply to this email). Backblaze Tech Day '24: Blaze Forward with AI We've set the agenda for this year's Tech Day, presented live on Tuesday September 24, from 10:00 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. PT. Join us for short sessions with AI pioneers Ori and Twelve Labs; a panel discussion  moderated by Backblaze Chief Technical Evangelist Pat Patterson that brings together AI experts from Ori, Twelve Labs, and Axle AI; and, of course, everyone's favorite cloud storage raconteur, Andy Klein, with the latest from the world of Drive Stats. Register now to secure your spot!   Register for Tech Day → Do More with Backblaze B2: A Tour of the Backblaze GitHub Repositories We've featured articles on the Backblaze B2 Python SDK and the Backblaze B2 Command Line Tool in previous newsletters, but did you know that there is also a Terraform Provider for Backblaze B2, an SDK for Java, and a whole slew of open source samples showing how to integrate with Backblaze B2 from web browsers, serverless platforms, and more? Learn about these tools and more in our tour of Backblaze's GitHub repositories.   Read the Blog Post → Backblaze Network Stats: Ingress Trends and What They Tell Us About Backup Behaviors Backblaze Technical Lead Network Engineer Brent Nowak continues his series of networking-focused blog posts with a look at how the combination of human behavior and the software we use results in a regular cadence in the traffic we see flowing into our data centers. Brent's conclusion and recommendation might just change the way you configure your backup jobs!   Check It Out → Command Like a Pro with New Backblaze B2 CLI Enhancements We've regularly covered updates to the Backblaze B2 CLI in the past, usually with a summary of the new functionality and a link to the CLI changelog. In his latest blog post, Bala Gangisetty, Sr. Product Manager for the B2 Cloud Storage platform, goes into more detail with updates as of 4.1.0, explaining the new, nested command structure and the b2 file unhide command.   Enhance Your Understanding → Build Your Own LLM with Backblaze B2 + Jupyter Notebook ChatGPT is great—you can paste in a chunk of text and then ask it questions based on that context. If, however, that context is proprietary, you might justifiably be resistant to uploading it into a public large language model (LLM); indeed, your workplace may well have prohibitions on doing exactly that! Building on the demo he presented in July's webinar, Leveraging your Cloud Storage Data in AI/ML Apps and Services, Pat Patterson explains how you can create your own LLM, and use retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to build a conversational chatbot that can answer questions using confidential data retrieved from a private Backblaze B2 Bucket.   Dive In to the Details → API Evangelist Conversation with Pat Patterson, Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze Kin Lane is the API Evangelist—he's been working in the API space for almost 15 years, advising governments and enterprises on all things API. Kin recently invited Pat to help kick off his new podcast, API Evangelist Conversations, with a short chat about evangelism, and how the S3 storage API has become a de facto standard.   Tune In to Kin and Pat → What Are Software Containers? Following up on last month's article on container orchestration, Backblaze Product Marketing Manager Vinodh Subramanian explains what we actually mean by the word "container" in the context of software. What's the difference between a container and a virtual machine? When should you use one, rather than the other? What tools can you use to work with containers? And, how are containers being used in the growing landscape of AI/ML development? Vinodh answers all these questions and more.   Read All About It → Know anyone who might like this newsletter? Forward this email to them so they can subscribe! Backblaze, 201 Baldwin Avenue, San Mateo, California 94401 Unsubscribe Manage preferences