Hello, world! We're Tigris Data, and today we're announcing the public beta of Tigris. Tigris is a globally distributed object storage service that provides low latency anywhere in the world, enabling developers like you to store and access any amount of data using the S3 libraries you're already using in production. Today, we're launching our public beta on top of Fly.io.
[Midjourney prompt: tiger face,
illustrated in binary code, blue and white.]
The backstory
Before founding Tigris, my co-founders Himank, Yevgeniy, and I spearheaded the storage platform teams at Uber. Over six years, we built and operated Uber's global storage infrastructure, supporting millions of users per day across the Uber Rides and Uber Eats apps.
Our projects, such as Docstore, Herb, and DBEvents, empowered thousands of internal developers to focus on their applications while we handled storage for them. This was great for the developers inside Uber, but we wanted to think bigger. We wanted anyone to be able to benefit from this kind of platform, even if you didn't work at Uber. After a lot of deliberation we ended up with Tigris: Globally distributed object storage for everyone.
In April 2023, I met with Kurt and the Fly.io team. Kurt's "two-hour problem" philosophy resonated with me. There isn't really any reason why it should take more than two hours to make my app run in more data centers at the same time. It's hard. Really hard. Entire venture-funded startups are designed around doing it and developers know it. They don't even try because they've been conditioned to give up and rightly so.
Fly.io makes it dead simple to run your application close to your users. They solved “being real-time” within a two-hour window for developers by enabling them to deploy their application on six continents using the same command they use to deploy it to one data center.
At Tigris, we share the same vision: storing objects globally shouldn't take more than two hours. It should be the default. Tigris takes care of the hard parts for you. It allows an application to read and write data globally with zero configuration. You can write objects in San Jose and then seamlessly fetch them from Sydney, all while getting local-read performance. You can even write conflicting updates in multiple regions simultaneously, and Tigris will resolve the conflicts and give a consistent global view of the data. It is a truly global active-active storage platform.
One of the main blockers for moving applications wholesale to a modern cloud such as Fly.io is storage. Many applications are forced to keep their storage on a traditional cloud like Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage because nobody really wants to mess with it once everything is configured to work. Tigris makes this turnkey.
That's why we're so excited to launch global object storage on Fly.io's platform across their 35+ locations.
Today, Tigris is deployed in FRA, GRU, IAD, JNB, LHR, MAD, ORD, SIN, SJC, and SYD. We're working on deploying across the rest of Fly.io's regions.
How do I get started?
To use Tigris, you need a Fly.io account. If you don't have
one, you can get yourself one here. Then it's as
simple as fly storage create:
$ fly storage create
? Choose a name, use the default, or leave blank to generate one: demo-bucket
Your project (demo-bucket) is ready. See details and next steps with:
Setting the following secrets on ot-demo:
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
BUCKET_NAME
AWS_ENDPOINT_URL_S3
Fill in the bucket name and the configuration for AWS S3 SDK will be injected into your application. All you need to do now is write objects into your bucket and they're globally available. Instantly.
A note on pricing
During the public beta starting today, we will not be charging for usage. We want to take this time to iron out any additional issues and make Tigris as polished as we can before we feel comfortable charging you for it. We will update you with pricing information as it becomes available. Don't worry though, everything will go into your Fly.io bill. We don't want to make your life harder with your accounting department in the process of making your life easier with cloud storage.
We hope you have fun building with Tigris and we would love to see what you build. Reach out to us on X (formerly Twitter), or on the Fly.io community forum and let us know your feedback.