For this special edition of TCP Talks, Justin Brodley and Matthew Kohn are joined by Chris Opat, SVP of Cloud Operations at Backblaze, to discuss how the cloud storage innovator is reshaping the industry landscape. From their origins as a consumer backup company to becoming a major player in enterprise cloud storage, Chris shares insights on AI workloads, the true cost of egress fees, and why your data doesn’t have to live in a walled garden. About Backblaze Backblaze started in 2007 with a simple mission: make storage so affordable it’s almost free. The company gained early notoriety for their DIY approach to storage infrastructure, with founders literally bending metal in apartments and conducting “gorilla storage purchasing” raids at Bay Area Best Buys and Fry’s Electronics to build their custom red storage pods. This scrappy, cost-conscious DNA remains central to the company’s identity today. In September 2015, Backblaze made their enterprise pivot with the launch of B2 Cloud Storage, entering the market at one-quarter the cost of Amazon S3. By December of that launch year, they had already attracted over 30,000 users. Today, Backblaze (NASDAQ: BLZE) manages approximately 4.7 exabytes of data across 310,000+ drives, serving over 500,000 customers in 175 countries. What sets Backblaze apart isn’t just their pricing—it’s their philosophy. While hyperscalers have built complex storage tiers with Byzantine billing structures, Backblaze offers one tier of hot storage with transparent, predictable pricing. Their recent push into AI workloads with B2 Overdrive demonstrates their ability to evolve with market demands while maintaining their core value proposition. About Chris Opat Chris Opat joined Backblaze as SVP of Cloud Operations in 2023, bringing over 25 years of experience in building teams and technology at startup and scale-up companies. Before Backblaze, he served as SVP of Platform Engineering and Operations at StackPath, specializing in edge technology and content delivery. His background includes extensive work with private equity portfolio companies, where he honed his skills in rapid transformation and growth. Chris describes himself as someone who thrives in “David vs. Goliath” scenarios, making Backblaze—with its mission to challenge the hyperscaler incumbents—a perfect fit. His passion for building exceptional technical teams and pushing technological boundaries aligns perfectly with Backblaze’s innovative culture. Interview Highlights The David vs. Goliath Mentality 3:15 Chris: “Nothing makes me happier than to watch a customer choose us over the incumbent competitors and have an exceptionally good experience. It’s easy to work for the incumbents and kind of win all the time. It feels so much better when you do it as the upstart that people don’t see coming.” Chris emphasized how Backblaze offers a fundamentally different partner experience compared to hyperscalers. While AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud may provide excellent services, they often lack the personal touch and flexibility that smaller customers need. At Backblaze, customers can directly influence product strategy and speak with decision-makers who shape the company’s direction. Egress Fees: The Hidden Tax of Cloud Storage 7:59 Chris: “Everybody who uses a hyperscaler is very familiar with the taxation of egress fees. It’s not a trivial subject… If you don’t know what you’re doing with a hyperscaler, egress fees can quickly sour your experience. They can drain your budget.” The discussion on egress fees revealed one of Backblaze’s key differentiators: their no egress fee policy through their Bandwidth Alliance partnerships. Chris shared a compelling example of a customer who saved hundreds of thousands of dollars on egress fees in their first year with Backblaze. This transparent pricing model contrasts sharply with hyperscalers, where egress costs can spiral out of control. When asked about recent announcements from Google and Amazon regarding “free” egress, Chris didn’t mince words: 10:07 Chris: “The devil’s in the details… The only way that they honor the free egress for repatriating your data is if you cancel all the services, and the cancellation timeframe… it’s something pretty brisk. It’s like 90 days or something.” AI Workloads: The New Frontier The conversation revealed how dramatically Backblaze’s customer base has evolved, particularly with AI workloads: 13:31 Chris: “We’ve got private connections to some customers where we’re serializing 400 gigabits per second line rate to them, so that they can very, very rapidly move libraries of data to tightly schedule back to back with perhaps maybe a GPU farm instance that they’ve got booked.” This represents a massive shift from their traditional backup use cases. The new B2 Overdrive product specifically addresses these high-bandwidth needs, offering performance levels that Chris claims most competitors “will not entertain giving you… They just flat out won’t.” The Scale Challenge Managing 4.7 exabytes across 310,000+ drives requires sophisticated capacity planning: 12:00 Chris: “It’s a full-time science to be fair. We’ve got people who are fully dedicated to this, and that’s what they do all day… We do nightly linear regressions on the installed environment.” Chris described the “triangle of tension” between reads, writes, and deletes on drives, explaining how they must carefully balance IOPS to ensure no customer experiences performance degradation. The shift from predictable consumer backup patterns to volatile AI workload demands has made this exponentially more complex. Data Sovereignty and Compliance With increasing global regulations around data privacy, Backblaze has invested heavily in ensuring compliance: 28:31 Chris: “When we designed our cluster in Toronto, data privacy and data sovereignty and security is taken extremely seriously there… We very, very carefully curated our network in market to ensure that Canadian customers would have their traffic ingress and egress through Canadian providers end to end.” This attention to data sovereignty extends beyond just storage location—it includes network routing, ensuring data never leaves jurisdictional boundaries unless explicitly requested by the customer. Green Initiatives and Sustainability The discussion touched on the growing importance of environmental considerations in data center operations: 31:55 Chris: “When we do a site selection process, we want to make sure that… their PUE and their operating profile fits what matches our personality… Being able to pass along a high efficiency PUE to a customer, it’s great for business.” Chris highlighted their Stockton, California facility as an example of their commitment to efficiency, noting it has “one of the most incredible PUEs ever.” Key Takeaways 1. Simple Pricing Wins Backblaze’s flat-rate, single-tier storage model eliminates the complexity of hyperscaler billing. No glacial retrieval fees, no complex lifecycle policies—just predictable costs. 2. Egress Freedom Matters The Bandwidth Alliance and no-egress-fee policy aren’t just marketing—they represent fundamental architectural decisions that save customers real money, especially for AI/ML workloads that require frequent data access. 3. Performance at Scale B2 Overdrive’s ability to deliver 400 Gbps demonstrates that alternative cloud providers can match or exceed hyperscaler performance for specific use cases. 4. Location Strategy is Key Strategic placement near GPU compute farms and careful attention to data sovereignty requirements shows Backblaze understands modern workload requirements. 5. The Human Touch Unlike hyperscalers where you need significant spend to get personal attention, Backblaze offers direct access to decision-makers and the ability to influence product direction. Technical Deep Dives Storage Architecture Evolution Chris revealed that Backblaze has moved beyond their famous DIY storage pods to work with OEM partners, enabling them to scale more efficiently while maintaining cost advantages. They’re also exploring flash storage integration to better serve high-IOPS workloads, particularly for AI inference use cases. Network Infrastructure The emphasis on peering relationships and private network interconnects (PNIs) demonstrates sophisticated network planning. Customers can specify routing preferences, including requirements for traffic to never transit the public internet. Capacity Planning for AI The shift from predictable backup workloads to volatile AI demands has required new approaches: Nightly linear regression analysis Real-time monitoring of the read/write/delete “triangle of tension” Flexible OEM partnerships for rapid capacity expansion Strategic geographic expansion to reduce latency to compute resources Industry Implications Chris’s insights suggest several important trends: The Egress Fee Backlash is Real: Hyperscaler “free egress” offers come with significant strings attached, validating alternative providers’ criticism of these practices. AI Changes Everything: Traditional storage patterns don’t apply to AI workloads. Providers must offer both massive bandwidth and flexible data lifecycle management. Hybrid Cloud is the Future: Customers want to use best-of-breed solutions, not be locked into a single provider’s ecosystem. Compliance Complexity is Growing: Data sovereignty isn’t just about location—it’s about network paths, audit trails, and provable data destruction. Quotes from Today’s Show On Customer Experience: “You probably can talk to people at Backblaze that are very influential, that are shaping the strategy of what we do. There’s every opportunity to help us guide part of our product strategy.” On Pricing Transparency: “Customer: “Sometimes we’re not
