B2 Cloud Storage Opens Public Beta

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage has moved to public beta, meaning anyone can sign up and start using the service.

Backblaze, Inc. announced the B2 Private Beta a couple of months ago and since then over 15,000 people helped find bugs, stress APIs, suggest features and more. Now it moves to public beta.

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
B2 Cloud Storage is a service that enables developers, IT people, and everyone else to store data in the cloud. Often referred to as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or object storage, it provides the ability to store, retrieve and/or share data and scale up and down, while only paying for what you use. B2 offers cloud storage similar to Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure storage and Google cloud Storage – but at a lower cost.

Private Beta in Review
Over 15,000 people signed up and were invited to the private beta. Backblaze started out slow – inviting just one person to the private beta in mid-October. He filed 18 bug reports in the first day (Thank you Jim.) Backblaze dugs in and within a week was ready to invite the next group of 5 users, then 10, then 100, then 1,000, then 3,000 and so on over the next few weeks. The company invited users from places far and wide: Australia, the UK, Europe, South America, and more. The feedback has been amazing and the firm continue to get constructive and creative ideas on functionality and new features.

B2 Community
Another awesome thing was how fast the developer community joined in to build wrappers, tools, and even integrations around and with B2. Already on GitHub there are dozens of API wrappers for various languages. Backblaze are in the process of establishing a repository in our GitHub account to link to these wrappers. It has also started an integrations page on its website to list and describe some of the integrations others have developed. For example HashBackup (server backup) and Duplicity (tar-formatted backup) have integrations that support B2, with a FUSE integration and others on the way.

What Would You Do With B2?
As the private beta progressed, Backblaze’s team met with dozens of companies to determine their goals in using B2.

Here’s a quick list of some of the planned uses for B2:

Backup data storage