Azion
Azion Builds Frictionless Cloud Storage Product with Powered by Backblaze
Azion
Júlio Silvello
Chief Product Officer, Azion
active users
global edge sites
delivery speed
Data transfer from IaaS storage to Azion added complexity and high egress costs for Azion customers. So, Azion decided to embed an integrated cloud storage solution for customers to store data on the same platform as their edge operations. To launch quickly, Azion needed a technology partner with expertise and low egress costs.
Powered by Backblaze enabled Azion to use Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage with enterprise-grade scalability, reliability, and security, while delivering a consistent user experience to Azion customers and their end users. The Powered by Backblaze program provides a Partner API for easy integration, Custom Domains to serve content from the web domain or URL of Azion's choosing, and 3x free egress. Azion has since migrated nearly 1PB of customer data to Backblaze B2.
With Powered by Backblaze, Azion didn’t have to build and maintain a scalable storage infrastructure themselves. Instead, the engineering team could incorporate Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage into their Edge Storage product without complex code, capital outlay, or massive expenses. Powered by Backblaze also enabled Azion to deliver improved performance, a better user experience, and lower costs to their customers.
Azion is an edge computing platform that simplifies how businesses build and run modern applications, delivering speed, reliability, and cost savings without compromising security and compliance.
Azion’s highly distributed architecture includes edge nodes located inside the last-mile networks of internet service providers and connectivity to multiple internet exchange points, private and public peerings, and Tier 1 transit providers around the world. Azion’s Edge Storage solution, built on Backblaze B2 via the Powered by Backblaze program, moves storage to Azion’s edge layer that sits on top of cloud infrastructure. This enables customers to move application storage off of IaaS solutions with expensive egress fees, like Amazon S3, to the edge layer where their applications and compute functions are running. With Backblaze, zero egress fees provide further cost savings.
Cloud storage is not our core competency, and building that expertise in-house would be a very complex problem. Powered by Backblaze allowed us to leverage Backblaze’s storage expertise with our distributed compute products, so we could build something great together.
Rafael Umann, CEO, Azion
Azion enables customers to transfer data to its platform from their existing IaaS storage. However, customers were asking for a better solution that was deeply integrated with the Azion platform, easier to use, and with lower egress costs. To build and deliver its own Edge Storage product to market quickly, Azion needed a technology partner who offered the right expertise, reliability, and scale, and could also pass along egress savings to its customers.
When exploring the capabilities of Backblaze B2, Azion found that the object storage solution could provide enterprise-grade scalability, reliability, and security, while delivering a consistent user experience to Azion customers and their end users. In particular, Backblaze’s Custom Domains feature allows Azion to securely serve content from their preferred URL without any complex code or proxy servers, and with 3x free egress, Azion customers could realize huge cost savings for their application or compute operations.
A big reason why we chose Backblaze was because our customers have mission-critical applications that require high availability, and Backblaze is a very reliable platform.
Júlio Silvello, Chief Product Officer, Azion
Powered by Backblaze enabled Azion to seamlessly integrate powerful storage capabilities into their new Edge Storage product using a simple API. Now, when an Azion customer needs to upload data to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, or deploy content to end users via the Azion CDN, it’s a quick two-step process using Azion’s CLI:
The customer incurs no egress fees for that data traffic. Azion even uses Backblaze internally for its own massive data storage needs.
Azion began working with its core enterprise customers to migrate data from their IaaS storage to Backblaze B2. Using Backblaze’s Partner API and Universal Data Migration service, Azion began moving almost a petabyte of data securely and without any business distraction or disruption. Backblaze’s S3-compatible API gives customers the flexibility to store data in both Edge Storage and Amazon S3 to meet their specific needs.
We aim to let customers choose the best solution for their business without having to be locked in or pay extra. That’s a core mindset that we share with Backblaze.
Gabriel de Nes, Software Engineering Director, Azion
Powered by Backblaze enabled Azion to seamlessly integrate Backblaze B2 into their Edge Storage product, so they could deliver object storage natively to customers and provide a singular customer experience at a reduced cost. Now, customers enjoy better availability of their data, lower latency access to the data, and zero egress costs. Azion has since begun using Powered by Backblaze in new products and capabilities, such as Edge Orchestrator.
