Backblaze Developer Newsletter—May 2025

Learn about our latest performance improvements, Backblaze B2 Overdrive, Bucket Access Logs, and more in our monthly newsletter for developers working with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage.

Hi there,   It's a packed developer newsletter this month, as blog authors both new and seasoned have been hard at work explaining performance improvements, announcing new features, reporting on hard drive reliability, and more. Read on for links to all the latest technical goings-on in the world of Backblaze. If there's anything else you'd really like to see here in the newsletter, on the blog, or in our documentation, please do let us know. Email your suggestions, and any other feedback, to us at evangelism@backblaze.com (or just reply to this email). Analyzing Performance at Exabyte Scale Engineering a multi-exabyte cloud storage platform is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge—the work is never, ever finished. We release new offerings, such as Backblaze B2 Overdrive, deploy new protocols, like IPv6, and constantly search for optimizations that can improve performance for you, our customers. In this post, Tim Johnson, Principal Software Engineer at Backblaze, talks about how the team approaches performance work in a principled, strategic way. Using the Shard Stash project as an example, Tim shares some great insights into how we work to make Backblaze B2 faster and better.   Read All About It → One Simple Change That Made Our Exabyte-Scale Storage Faster Following on from Tim Johnson's post on analyzing performance (above), Backblaze Senior Software Engineer Jerry Sha explains how an almost laughably simple idea, combining two separate network requests into one, significantly improved Backblaze B2 download performance.   Check It Out → Meet B2 Overdrive: Terabit-Speed Throughput for AI/ML and HPC Workloads Backblaze B2 Overdrive offers terabit speeds for exabyte-scale datasets, eliminating the trade-off between high performance and cost for data-intensive workloads like AI, machine learning (ML), and high-performance compute (HPC). Starting at $15/TB/month, it includes unlimited free egress and private networking for fast, secure, and predictable performance. Read all about it in the official announcement.   Discover B2 Overdrive → Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2025 The first Drive Stats report of 2025 sees the debut of a new team as Andy Klein, our former Principal Cloud Storage Storyteller, moves on from Backblaze to focus on reducing his golf handicap. Writer Stephanie Doyle and Chief Technical Evangelist Pat Patterson pick up the reins, reporting on the 308,861 hard drives that currently store your data. Also new, our data pipeline for handling drive data and our 24TB Seagate drives, which have accumulated enough drive days to appear in the Q1 2025 lifetime rankings.   Dive In to the Stats → Iceberg on Backblaze B2 What is Apache Iceberg, and how can you leverage it to efficiently store data in object stores such as Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage? Backblaze Chief Technical Evangelist Pat Patterson answers both of those questions in this blog post, showing you how to manipulate an Iceberg table, stored in a Backblaze B2 Bucket, from Snowflake, Trino and DuckDB.   Catch Up on Apache Iceberg → Preview Bucket Access Logs for Greater Visibility and Control A new Backblaze B2 feature, Bucket Access Logs, lets you see a detailed record of operations performed against objects inside your buckets. Whether you're managing a growing archive, running audits, or troubleshooting automated workflows, these logs can provide the insights you need to stay in control of your data. Bala Krishna Gangisetty, Product Leader at Backblaze, invites you to preview Bucket Access Logs in this blog post.   Learn How to Log Access to Your Buckets → 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