Healthchecks.io Now Uses Self-Hosted Object Storage

zzdw about 4 hours ago 46 commentsRead Article on blog.healthchecks.io

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Discussion (46 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

smjburton•about 2 hours ago

> In March 2026, I migrated to self-hosted object storage powered by Versity S3 Gateway.

Thanks for sharing this, I wasn't even aware of Versity S3 from my searches and discussions here. I recently migrated my projects from MinIO to Garage, but this seems like another viable option to consider.

zenoprax•10 minutes ago

First time hearing about Versity for me too. I thought "S3 Gateways" were an Amazon-only service rather than something mere mortals could set up.

I've been trying to give some containers (LXC/D and OCI) unprivileged access to a network-accessible ZFS filesystem and this might be what I need. Managing UID/GID through bind-mounts from the host to the container (ie NFS on host) has been trickier than I was expecting.

kikoreis•15 minutes ago

As a user for over a decade, just here to submit my appreciation. healthchecks.io is fantastic.

tobilg•about 3 hours ago

I don't get it, if it's running on the same (mentioning "local") machine, why does it even need the S3 API? Could just be plain IO on the local drive(s)

ethan_smith•about 2 hours ago

The app was already built against the S3 API when it used cloud storage. Keeping that interface means the code doesn't change - you just point it at a local S3-compatible gateway instead of AWS/DO. Makes it trivial to switch back or move providers if needed.

cuu508•about 3 hours ago

(Author here) There are multiple web servers for redundancy (3 currently), and each needs access to all objects.

PunchyHamster•about 2 hours ago

with average object size of 8.5kB I'd honestly consider storing it as blobs in cloud DB, with maybe some small per-server cache in front

orev•about 3 hours ago

If the app was written using the S3 API, it would be much faster/cheaper to migrate to a local system the provides the same API. Switching to local IO would mean (probably) rewriting a lot of code.

0x457•about 2 hours ago

Surely "read object" and "write object" are not hard to migrate to local file system. You can also use Apache OpenDAL which provide the same interface to both.

QuercusMax•about 1 hour ago

Yeah, unless you have the raw S3 API throughout your codebase you should be able to write a couple dozen lines of code (maximum) to introduce a shim that's trivial to replace with local file access. In fact, I've done this in most projects that work with S3 or similar APIs so I can test them locally without needing real S3!

zipy124•about 3 hours ago

seperate machine I think given the quoted point at the end:

> The costs have increased: renting an additional dedicated server costs more than storing ~100GB at a managed object storage service. But the improved performance and reliability are worth it.

VHRanger•about 3 hours ago

The S3 API doesn't work like normal filesystem APIs.

Part of it is that it follows the object storage model, and part of it is just to lock people into AWS once they start working with it.

tobilg•about 3 hours ago

I'm 100% aware of how S3 works. I was questioning why the S3 API is needed when the service is using local storage.

zdw•about 3 hours ago

Sometimes API compatibility is an important detail.

I've worked at a few places where single-node K8s "clusters" were frequently used just because they wanted the same API everywhere.

_joel•about 3 hours ago

Apart from all these other products that implement s3? MinIO, Ceph (RGW), Garage, SeaweedFS, Zenko CloudServer, OpenIO, LakeFS, Versity, Storj, Riak CS, JuiceFS, Rustfs, s3proxy.

0x457•about 2 hours ago

Riak CS been dead for over a decade which makes me question the rest. Some of these also do not have the same behaviors when it comes to paths (MinIO is one of those IIRC).

Also, none of them implement full S3 API and features.

throw1234567891•about 3 hours ago

What kind of vendor lock-in do you even talk about. Their API is public knowledge, AWS publishes the spec, there are multiple open source reference client implementations available on GitHub, there are multiple alternatives supporting the protocol, you can find writings from AWS people as high in hierarchy as Werner Vogels about internals. Maybe you could say that some s3 features with no alternative implementation in alternative products are a lock-in. I would consider it a „competitive advantage”. YMMV.

jen20•about 3 hours ago

> part of it is just to lock people into AWS once they start working with it.

This is some next-level conspiracy theory stuff. What exactly would the alternative have been in 2006? S3 is one of the most commonly implemented object storage APIs around, so if the goal is lock-in, they're really bad at it.

daveguy•about 3 hours ago

> What exactly would the alternative have been in 2006?

Well, WebDAV (Document Authoring and Versioning) had been around for 8 years when AWS decided they needed a custom API. And what service provider wasn't trying to lock you into a service by providing a custom API (especially pre-GPT) when one existed already? Assuming they made the choice for a business benefit doesn't require anything close to a conspiracy theory.

And it worked as a moat until other companies and open source projects started cloning the API. See also: Microsoft.

rconti•about 2 hours ago

Or a simple SAN

esafak•about 3 hours ago

So you don't need to refactor your code?

ryanjshaw•about 3 hours ago

And when/if you decide to head back to a 3rd party it requires no refactoring again.

tobilg•about 3 hours ago

yeah, sure, those 5-10 different API calls would surely be a huge toll to refactor... I'd rather run an additional service to reimplement the S3 API mapping to my local drive /s

lsb•about 3 hours ago

Self Hosted object storage looks neat!

For this project, where you have 120GB of customer data, and thirty requests a second for ~8k objects (0.25MB/s object reads), you’d seem to be able to 100x the throughput vertically scaling on one machine with a file system and an SSD and never thinking about object storage. Would love to see why the complexity

cuu508•about 2 hours ago

(Author here) that's more or less what I have right now – one machine with a file system and an SSD. S3 API on top is there to give multiple web servers shared access to the same storage. I could have used something else instead of S3 – say, NFS – but there was a feature request for S3 [1] and S3 has a big ecosystem around it already.

[1] https://github.com/healthchecks/healthchecks/issues/609

jakewins•about 3 hours ago

The complexity for that is almost always for redundancy and for ease of deploys.

chasd00•about 1 hour ago

> The costs have increased: renting an additional dedicated server costs more than storing ~100GB at a managed object storage service. But the improved performance and reliability are worth it.

Were your users complaining about reliability and performance? If it cost more, adds more work (backup/restore management), and the users aren't happier then why make the change in the first place?

encoderer•42 minutes ago

Not the OP but I have some… similar experience. When you run a high availability service without a full ops team, reliable infrastructure is non-negotiable. Burn out has to be managed.

_joel•about 4 hours ago

I'm sure it's a lot better now but everytime I see btrfs I get PTSD.

060880•about 3 hours ago

Same here. Had a production node running btrfs under heavy write load (lots of small files, frequent creates) and spent two days debugging what turned out to be filesystem-level corruption. Switched to ext4 and never looked back. The article doesn't mention what filesystem sits under Versitygw here, which seems like a pretty relevant omission for anyone thinking of replicating the setup.

uroni•about 3 hours ago

I'd worry about file create, write, then fsync performance with btrfs, but not about reliability or data-loss.

But a quick grep across versitygw tells me they don't use Sync()/fsync, so not a problem... Any data loss occurring from that is obviously not btrfs fault.

__turbobrew__•about 2 hours ago

I hit a panic in btrfs using an ubuntu 24 LTS kernel. The trauma is still well and alive.

poly2it•about 4 hours ago

Care to elaborate? I've heard good things about it, but am personally a ZFS user.

metadat•about 3 hours ago

Years of serious corruption bugs.

dundercoder•about 3 hours ago

Gluster was that for me

choilive•about 1 hour ago

Moved object storage from AWS to CloudFlare and have been pretty happy. No problems with performance so far. Bills were 90% cheaper too (free bandwidth)

iamcreasy•about 2 hours ago

Given the individual file size and total volume, I'd argue it make sense to use move to local only storage.

On a separate note, what tool is the final benchmark screenshot form?

cuu508•about 1 hour ago

The graphs are from Netdata. I'm using it to monitor the servers, and also feeding it some application metrics via its statsd interface.