NAB 2024: Backblaze Enables Automated Cloud Workflows With New Event Notifications

Backblaze, a specialized cloud storage platform, announced the launch of Event Notifications, a service that instantly notifies users and external cloud services whenever data changes in Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage. The new release gives businesses the freedom to build automated workloads across the different best-of-breed cloud platforms they use or want to use, saving time and money and improving end user experiences.

With Backblaze’s Event Notifications, data changes—like uploads, updates, or deletions—can automatically trigger other actions including transcoding video files, sending reports to IT teams, spooling up data analytics, delivering finished assets to end users, and many others. Previous to this announcement, companies often had to settle for notification features that restricted them to one platform or tied them to legacy intermediary tools like AWS messaging services. This solution from Backblaze enables them to break free from the restrictive and expensive intermediaries and orchestrate activity between their preferred solution providers on their own terms.

“Companies increasingly want to leverage best-of-breed providers to grow their business, versus being locked into the traditional closed cloud providers,” says Gleb Budman, Backblaze CEO and Chairperson of the Board. “Our new Event Notifications service unlocks the freedom for our customers to build their cloud workflows in whatever way they prefer.”

The new service can send notifications to any external designated endpoint, eliminating unnecessary complexity and overhead through:

• Cloud Services Automation: Triggers services such as provisioning cloud resources or automating transcoding and compute instances in response to data changes.
• Accelerated Deployment: Speeds up content delivery and responsiveness to customer demand with automated asset tracking and streamlined media production.
• Proactive Security: Helps IT teams to monitor and respond to changes as they occur with real-time notifications, safeguarding critical assets.

“With Event Notifications, we can eliminate the final AWS component, Simple Queue Service (SQS), from our infrastructure. This completes our transition to a more streamlined and cost-effective tech stack, “ says Oleh Aleynik, Senior Software Engineer and Co-Founder at CloudSpot. “It’s not just about simplifying operations—it’s about achieving full independence from legacy systems and future-proofing our infrastructure.”

This new service supports the expanding use of serverless architecture and specialized microservices across clouds, highlighting Backblaze’s commitment to helping forward-thinking organizations operate their way, easily and affordably in an open cloud environment. For more information about Event Notifications, visit the Backblaze blog.

Event Notifications is available in private preview today with general availability planned later this year. Organizations can join the private preview waiting list.