Backblaze Developer Newsletter—February 2025

Learn about building AI Agents, the latest Drive Stats report, and more in our monthly newsletter for developers working with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage.

Hi there,   This month brings a deep dive into AI agents from Pat Patterson, our Chief Technology Evangelist, the very last Drive Stats report from Andy Klein (don't worry—he's passed it on to very capable hands!) and an important note about the AWS CLI and SDKs.    Please let us know what you'd like to see here in the newsletter, on the blog, or in the documentation. Email your suggestions, and any other feedback, to us at evangelism@backblaze.com (or just reply to this email). Building an AI Agent with Backblaze B2, LangChain, and Drive Stats What is an AI agent? What can it do? How do you create one? Backblaze Chief Technology Evangelist Pat Patterson answers these questions and more in his latest blog post. Pat walks you through using the LangChain AI framework, implementing an AI agent in Python that can accept natural language questions about hard drive reliability, create and execute SQL queries against the Drive Stats dataset (stored in Backblaze B2 using the Iceberg table format) via the Trino SQL engine, and produce a natural language response based on the result set.   Read all about it → Check Your AWS CLI and SDK Versions Last month, AWS released an update to their CLI and suite of SDKs that is currently incompatible with Backblaze B2. If you see errors relating to unsupported headers such as x-amz-sdk-checksum-algorithm or x-amz-checksum-crc32, you should use a version of the AWS tool released prior to Jan 15, 2025. The Backblaze documentation pages for popular AWS SDKs list the latest working versions, and we uploaded a full list as a GitHub Gist. Our engineers are hard at work updating checksum handling in Backblaze B2—watch this space for an update.   Go to the documentation → Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024 As always, Drive Stats brings you our real-world experience of operating a fleet of hundreds of thousands of hard drives, helping guide your purchasing decisions. It's a bittersweet annual report this year, though, as Backblaze Principal Cloud Storage Storyteller Andy Klein hangs up his spreadsheet and walks off into the sunset. Get the lowdown on how our 300k+ data drives are doing, the new 24TB Seagate drives that have joined our fleet, which drive models survived the last quarter of 2024 with no failures, and discover who is picking up the Drive Stats reins.   Dive into the drive data → 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