Backblaze is not a traditional unicorn or unicorn-aspirant. We take a bootstrapped and simple low-cost approach to operations that differs from the current cloud-based trends. This has some key advantages in terms of not requiring heavy VC backing and all that entails, but also presents a different set of challenges. I’ll be describing some of those challenges from the point of view of someone who recently moved from large scale and is now adapting to a smaller scale.

Elliott Sims is a Senior Sysadmin at Backblaze. Previously, he worked at Facebook from 2009-2015 building and maintaining infrastructure through exponential growth.