Amplify
Data Platform Saves Egress and Stores Smarter With Snowflake + Backblaze
Amplify
Ameya Pathare
Co-Founder & CTO, Amplify
Cost Savings
Weeks to Production
Egress
Amplify, a data processing platform, uses Snowflake, a data cloud provider, as the central hub for all of their data. They originally leveraged Amazon S3 as object storage for pre-download staging, but rigid data workflows and AWS’ high egress fees hindered customer format preferences and ate through their startup resources.
Amplify shifted from Amazon S3 to Backblaze B2. Since Backblaze had a Terraform provider and was operable with the same S3 API, Amplify was able to migrate to Backblaze with minimal code changes. Implementation took a total of two weeks with no downtime, immediately solving Amplify’s egress fee problem while maintaining uninterrupted high-quality service.
With Backblaze-compatible Terraform scripts, Amplify ensures client onboarding efficiency remains high. With free egress from Backblaze up to three times the data stored, Amplify clients (and their customers) can download datasets as often as necessary in the formats they want without it costing a fortune. So far, Backblaze has saved Amplify’s customers 70% on egress—a figure that only compounds with time.
Amplify helps data providers close more deals, onboard clients faster, and increase customer satisfaction with Amplify's all-in-one data sales and delivery platform. The platform allows providers to deliver data across clouds and formats while saving on egress and storage costs.
The Amplify platform ingests all the data that providers typically spread across a variety of sources, then passes it through a data storage and transformation layer powered by Snowflake and Backblaze B2. Snowflake powers data transformations into standardized formats, which can then be consumed via cloud analytical environments like Google BigQuery or Tableau. Snowflake also transforms the data into file-based consumption options like .csv or .parquet that are staged in Backblaze B2. If consumers prefer to work with offline files, Amplify can easily push the data from Backblaze B2 via API, SFTP, or direct download.
Prior to co-founding Amplify, CTO Ameya Pathare produced analytical dashboards for stakeholders across Mastercard as the VP of Business Insights and Data Engineering. While visual dashboards had their place, the most popular dashboard was just a table of numbers, and many teams wanted to export the data to do their own analysis. This led his team on a transformative journey to effectively provide self-serve data access while worrying about permissions, data quality, and varying tech stacks. Like many large enterprises that grew via acquisition, transferring data across business units was akin to transferring data between companies. Pathare co-founded Amplify in 2022 to make it easier to share data between organizations and truly strive for data democratization. One of Amplify's first clients, Dewey, gives researchers at universities like Stanford, Yale, and MIT access to hundreds of data products across dozens of different data providers, exemplifying the power and opportunity unlocked by enabling frictionless data access.
When everyone’s not on the same tech stack, data transfer is hard and annoying. That’s what we set out to fix with Amplify.
Ameya Pathare, Co-Founder & CTO, Amplify
When they first launched, Amplify had to:
One day, Pathare received an email saying Amplify’s free AWS credits were about to run out. At the same time Amplify’s client base was growing, and in turn their client’s customers were downloading more datasets. Suddenly, their egress fees increased to 10 times what they pay for storage alone.
Pathare started looking for a better way to keep all that data highly accessible without burning through Amplify’s startup funding. He compared Backblaze against other solutions like Azure, Digital Ocean, Google Cloud Services (GCS), and Wasabi. Pathare had three main priorities that made Backblaze the best choice:
For any infrastructure project, the goal is that you don’t have to think about it once you set it up. That’s why Backblaze is a big plus for us.
Ameya Pathare, Co-Founder & CTO, Amplify
It took just two weeks for Amplify to fully implement Backblaze B2. “We were motivated to do it quickly since we were losing money by the day,” Pathare says. They transferred file storage from Amazon S3 to a unique Backblaze B2 Bucket for each Amplify client, completing the migration with no downtime. Proofs of concept along the way ensured that Pathare would be able to reliably provide key functionality while also setting up access controls to keep different Amplify clients’ data from comingling.
Backblaze had the best pricing structure we found.
Ameya Pathare, Co-Founder & CTO, Amplify
Thanks to Backblaze’s zero-cost egress for up to three times the average monthly data stored, Amplify has saved as much as 70%. Although Pathare expects Amplify’s storage needs to increase as the company grows, eliminating those high egress fees means Amplify’s cost savings will only compound the more a given dataset is downloaded. Those savings go directly to Amplify’s product development efforts and help them stay competitive in the crowded data processing marketplace.
