Backblaze Developer Newsletter—February 2026

Hi there,

The big news from Backblaze this month is Flamethrower, a startup program designed to help early-stage teams build high-performance, cost-effective, cloud storage into their offerings from the outset, rather than learning expensive lessons down the road.

We also bring you our latest round of stats; our Drive Stats report for 2025 includes quarterly, annual, and lifetime data on our fleet of over 330,000 hard drives, while Network Stats explains how AI-focused cloud providers, or neoclouds for short, are reshaping the network traffic we see at Backblaze.

Rounding out the newsletter, we have a follow up to last month's announcement of a new set of S3-compatible APIs for managing lifecycle rules in Backblaze B2. This time we're taking a closer look at how you can use this new functionality to integrate with existing tools and workflows.

As always, feel free to email your suggestions, and any other feedback, to us at evangelism@backblaze.com (or just reply to this email). If there's anything else you'd really like to see here in the newsletter, on the blog, or on Backblaze Tech Lab, our dev-focused webinar series, please do let us know.

Introducing the Backblaze Flamethrower Startup Program

Building a startup is hard. Decisions made early on as you're racing to get to market can come back to bite you, particularly when it comes to your choice of cloud storage provider. It's a pattern we've seen again and again: an early-stage company builds a great product, taking full advantage of their provider's credit program. However, just as the product is taking off, the credits run out, and they become victims of their own success, facing eye-watering monthly bills that will only increase as they grow.

With this in mind, we created the Backblaze Flamethrower Startup Program, designed to meet teams early in their journey, as they are making the choices that will later make the difference between success and failure. Read the blog post to learn more about what makes Flamethrower unique.

Read All About It →

A Deeper Look at S3 Compatible Lifecycle Rules in Backblaze B2

Lifecycle rules are an essential feature of Backblaze B2, helping you keep storage costs under control and manage data retention by automating actions such as deleting old objects, hiding previous versions, and cleaning up incomplete multipart uploads. Following up on our recent announcement of a new set of S3 compatible APIs for managing lifecycle rules, this month's post details the new APIs, dives into how lifecycle rules work at a deeper level, and explains what you should keep in mind when using them in production.

Read the Blog Post →

Backblaze Drive Stats for 2025

As Drive Stats enters its thirteenth year, our hard drive fleet continues to expand in both the total number of drives in operation and their capacity, as we deploy our first 26TB drives. In this report, we bring you quarterly, annual and lifetime numbers for over 330,000 drives, including those all-important annualized failure rates (aka AFRs).

The report is linked below if you're a fan of reading the data; you can also check out the on-demand webinar if you prefer video.

Dive Into the Data →

Network Stats for Q4 2025: Neocloud Traffic Trends

In our second quarterly Network Stats report, Technical Lead Network Engineer Brent Nowak continues his exploration of how AI is reshaping the network traffic we handle at Backblaze. This quarter, in addition to his regular data analysis, Brent looks at where AI-driven traffic is concentrated, how ingress and egress patterns show up in the data, and what the findings say about where AI infrastructure might be headed next.

Find Out More →

Know anyone who might like this newsletter? Forward this email to them so they can subscribe!