Developers: Spring Into Action With Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

Spring is in the air here in the Northern Hemisphere, and a developer’s fancy lightly turns to new projects. Whether you’ve already discovered how astonishingly easy it is to work with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage or not, we hope you find this collection of handy tips, tricks, and resources useful—many of the techniques apply no matter where you are storing data. But first, let’s have a little fun…

Backblaze Developer Meetup

Whether you call yourself a developer, software engineer, or programmer, if you are a Backblaze B2 customer or are just Backblaze B2-curious and want to hang out in person with like-minded folks, here’s your chance. Backblaze is hosting its very first developer meetup on May 24th from 6–8 p.m. in downtown San Mateo, California. We’ll be joined by Gleb Budman, CEO and Co-founder of Backblaze, members of our Engineering team, our Developer Evangelism team, sales engineers, product managers, and more. There’ll be snacks, drinks, prizes, and more. Space is limited, so please sign up for a spot using this Google Form by May 13th and we’ll let you know if there’s space.

Join Us at GlueCon 2022

Are you going to GlueCon 2022? Backblaze will be there! GlueCon is a developer-centric event that will be held in Broomfield, Colorado on May 18th and 19th, 2022. Backblaze is the partner sponsor of the event and Pat Patterson, our chief technical evangelist, will deliver one of the keynotes. There’s still time to learn more and sign up for GlueCon 2022, but act now!

Tips and Tricks

Here’s a collection of tips and tricks we’ve published over the last few months. You can take them as written or use your imagination as to what other problems you can solve.

  • Media Transcoding With Backblaze B2 and Vultr Cloud Compute
    Your task is simple: allow users to upload video from their mobile or desktop device and then make that video available to a wide variety of devices anywhere in the world. We walk you through how we built a very simple video sharing site with Backblaze B2 and Vultr’s Infrastructure Cloud using Vultr’s Cloud Compute instances for the application servers and their new Optimized Cloud Compute instances for the transcoding workers. This includes setup instructions for Vultr and sample code in GitHub.
  • Free Image Hosting With Cloudflare and Backblaze B2
    Discover how the combination of Cloudflare and Backblaze B2 allows you to create your own, personal 10GB image hosting site for free. You start out using Cloudflare Transform Rules to give you access to HTTP traffic at the CDN edge server. This allows you to manipulate the URI path, query string, and HTTP headers of incoming requests and outgoing responses. We provide step-by-step instructions on how to setup both Cloudflare and Backblaze B2 and leave the rest up to you.
  • Building a Multiregion Origin Store With Backblaze B2 and Fastly Compute@Edge
    Compute@Edge is a serverless computing environment built on the same caching platform as the Fastly Deliver@Edge CDN. Serverless computing removes provisioning, configuration, maintenance, and scaling from the equation. One place where this technology can be used is in serving your own data from multiple Backblaze B2 regions—in other words, serve it from the closest or most available location. Learn how to create a Compute@Edge application and connect it to Backblaze B2 buckets making your data available anywhere.
  • Using a Cloudflare Worker to Send Notifications on Backblaze B2 Events
    When building an application, a common requirement is to be able to send a notification of an event (e.g., a user uploading a file) so that an application can take some action (e.g., processing the file). Learn how you can use a Cloudflare Worker to send event notifications to a wide range of recipients, allowing great flexibility when building integrations with Backblaze B2.

Additional Resources

What’s Next?

Coming soon on our blog, we’ll provide a developer quick start kit using Python that you can use with the Backblaze S3 Compatible API to store and access data in B2 Cloud Storage. The quick start kit includes:

  1. A sample application with open-source code on GitHub.
  2. Video code walk-throughs of the sample application.
  3. Hosted sample data.
  4. Guided instructions that walk you through downloading the sample code, running it yourself, and then using the code as you see fit, including incorporating it into your own applications.

Launching in mid-May; stay tuned!

Wrap-up

Hopefully you’ve found a couple of things you can try out using Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage. Join the many developers around the world who have discovered how easy it can be to work with Backblaze B2. If you have any questions, you can visit www.backblaze.com/help.html to use our Knowledge Base, chat with our customer support, or submit a customer support request. Of course, you’ll find lots of other developers online who are more than willing to help as well. Good luck and invent something awesome.

About Andy Klein

Andy Klein is the Principal Cloud Storage Storyteller at Backblaze. He has over 25 years of experience in technology marketing and during that time, he has shared his expertise in cloud storage and computer security at events, symposiums, and panels at RSA, SNIA SDC, MIT, the Federal Trade Commission, and hundreds more. He currently writes and rants about drive stats, Storage Pods, cloud storage, and more.