Colossus for Rapid Storage
Very cool! This makes Google the only major cloud that has low-latency single-zone object storage, standard regional object storage, and transparently-replicated dual-region object storage - all with the same API.
For infra systems, this is great: code against the GCS API, and let the user choose the cost/latency/durability tradeoffs that make sense for their use case.
FYI this was unveiled at the 2025 Google Next conference, and they're apparently unveiling a gRPC client for Rapid Storage, which appears to be a very thin wrapper over Colossus itself, as this is just zonal storage.
This could actually speed up some of my scientific computing (in some cases, data localization/delocalization is an important part of overall instance run-time). I will be interested to try it.
Had to go back to the classic microservices video as I was pretty sure they used Colossus but it was actually Galactus & Omega Star.
Glad to see the zonal object store take off. Such massive bandwidth speed will re define data analytics where 99% of all queries able to run on a single node faster than what distributed compute can offer.
This link makes so much more sense than the previous link did.
SSDs with high random I/o speeds are a significant contributor to the advantage. I think 20m writes per second are likely distributed over a network of drives to make that kind of speed possible.
I want chubby as a service so I can throw etcd and zookeeper in the trash.
Similar to S3 express one zone
For some reason, text highlight didn't work, so here's the text-highlighted link: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/whats-new-wit...
Is this related at all the the private invite only anywhere caches? (or maybe they're GA now?)
Is it like PureStorage?
There's a detailed blog post about Rapid Storage now available, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43645309
(I work on Google storage)
Super interesting! Rapid Storage especially, very useful, but that first line:
"Today's innovation isn't born in a lab or at a drafting board; it's built on the bedrock of AI infrastructure. "
Uhh..No. Even as an AI developer I can tell that is some AI Comms person tripping over.
Everyone needs to learn to use a single, unique, unambiguous URL for new product announcements like this.
Google aren't the only company that consistently mess this up, but given how they built a 1.95 trillion company on top of crawling URLs on the web they really should have an internal culture that values giving things unique URLs!
[I had to learn this lesson myself: I used to blog "weeknotes" every week or two where I'd bundle all of my project announcements together and it sucked not being able to link to them as individual posts]
Hats off to whoever convinced management that selling Colossus via cloud was Artificial Intelligence. Bravo.
Reading the press release about the "Hypercomputer" and I can't tell what part of this is real and what part is marketing.
They say it comes in two configuration, 256 chips or 9,216 chips. They also say that the maximal configuration of 9,216 chips delivers 24x the compute power of the world's largest supercomputer (which they say is called El Capitan). They say that this comes to 42.6 exaFLOPs.
This implies that the 9,216 chip configuration doesn't actually exist in any form in reality, or else it would now be the world's largest supercomputer (by flops) by a huge margin.
Am I massively misunderstanding what the claims being made are about the TPU and the 42.6 exaFLOPs? I feel like this would be much bigger news if this was fully legit.
Edit: The flops being benchmarked are not the same as regular supercomputer flops.
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Terrifyingly complicated and buzzword packed. I really don't know what to make of any of this or what it does, and I work with AI applications in my day job.
I'm guessing the $300 of Google Cloud credit offered in this webpage wouldn't go very far using any of this stuff?
Like with any other new Google product, better wait a few years to see if it sticks before investing in its usage. In most cases, you'd be better off searching for an alternative from the start.
If you want object storage faster than S3 Express One Zone or GCP Rapid Storage without the zonal limitation check out ACS: https://acceleratedcloudstorage.com
You can bring data in and out of the GPU quickly and improve utilization.
(This was posted last night with https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/whats-new-wit... above. We've changed the URL to the product-specific article.)