Introducing Archil

I'm thrilled to announce that Regatta Storage is now known as "Archil", better highlighting our ability to help customers with their data management challenges beyond pure-storage solutions. At Archil, we're building the next-generation of volume storage for modern cloud applications that's 30x faster than S3, and 90% lower cost than using EBS volumes directly. We can't wait to share them with you, and you should join our waitlist to be among the first to know when they're generally available.

Background

I spent the past 10 years in the cloud storage industry, leading teams at Amazon's Elastic File System and at Netflix and working with hundreds of different data teams. This experience highlighted a core, common problem: even though S3 had become the standard way to store inactive data in the cloud, the technology to store the active data that instances were currently using, hadn't progressed much in 15 years.

The standard solution is to use an EBS volume, which requires that developers provision the amount of storage they need upfront. However, most applications have storage needs that change over time, or aren't even known before an application goes live. Worse, EBS becomes an obstacle to these applications as they continue to grow. As you split your application into more and more instances, it becomes impossible to share data across instances because EBS volumes can only be attached to a single instance at a time. If you're loading data from a repository like S3, cold start times of services will degrade as the data set gets larger -- because each new instance requires downloading the entire data set to newly launched instances.

Some teams need data sharing enough that they try to use a shared file system product such as EFS or FSx. Beyond the high costs of these products, the sharp performance degradation that comes from using a remote file system product is often untenable for most critical applications.

Archil volumes

We realized that there had a to be a better solution, one that didn't have so many sharp edges for teams, and we came up with Archil volumes. An Archil volume is an infinitely-scaleable, shareable storage device which provides instant access to massive data sets stored in S3. With an Archil volume, teams don't have to worry about over-provisioning or running out of space, because they grow to petabyte-scale with your application and only charge for the data that you're actively using. It's simple to scale an application to multiple instances because Archil volumes can be used from multiple instances simultaneously -- providing a consistent view of the same data set. Finally, Archil volumes connect directly to data repositories like S3 so that you can use data stored in these buckets without needing to first download it. Best of all, they are fully POSIX-compatible so they already work with all of your applications -- with no code changes required.

We're excited to share more details of our volumes, and what our customers are using them for in the coming weeks. We're based in San Francisco, and we're always looking for great engineers to join us and help change how applications are built for the cloud. If you'd like to work with us, feel free to contact us here.