Deep Dive | Suite Studios
Suite Studios is a cloud storage solution that acts like a local drive, mounted to your computer. The company leverages FUSE, which stands for Filesystem in Userspace, and is a way to create a bridge between your computer's system and a variety of storage options or file systems without needing to deeply integrate them into the core part of your computer's operating system. With FUSE, you can add new types of storage systems or file formats to your computer easily, without needing to modify the core operating system.
The company also leverages a whole lot of proprietary front end work as well as AWS s3 bucket storage to create a genuinely pleasant user experience with theoretically infinitely scalable storage.
Here are some of the main ways Suite stands out:
Speedy and Direct Support
Suite has a built in support chat that connects you directly to the people running the company. There's no filter or redirect happening, you have a direct line at all times, and you'll always get a response, whether it's with an estimated response time, or the direct response from the person themselves.
Incredible User Interface and Ease of Use
Suite is really well designed. They have cool tricks like OS aware install instructions that you can access with a QR code, and a super intuitive permissions window. It's really snappy and pretty, and overall just feels like a premium piece of software.
The Storage Transfers are Insanely Fast
Since Suite isn't technically a sync solution, it's cloud storage, you're never sending files back and forth from a relay. You have a direct gateway to your cloud storage. It's like having a magical library on your bookshelf that includes all the books at the library, and makes one available to you when you want it. Rather than going to the library and borrowing a book, bringing it back. All the books just live in your bookshelf, ready to be accessed. See here for How Cloud FUSE Storage Works
Transactional Writes
No corrupted files. Basically a "transaction" in suite is a group of operations that are treated as a single all or nothing operation. When a transaction for a file write succeeds, there's 100% confidence that the file is correct and exists where it needs to. If a transaction fails, no updates to that file will be see by any user, client or future call referencing that file. This means that if any component in the Suite process fails, like your internet connection, the user can have confidence that the data that's in Suite, is 100% there, or 100% not there (with a clear warning that it wasn't added).
Versioning
Suite is set up so every instance of your storage is snapshotted and can be reverted back to based on the time and date you want to return to.
The Ability to Make your On-Premise Storage a Cloud Storage
Suite is basically an IT company that owns some really amazing proprietary UI stuff for accessing AWS cloud storage. Or maybe it's IBM... but it's built on a cloud platform, and exposed to users as a SUPER user friendly interface that makes the whole thing feel like magic. Part of that behind the scenes heavy lift can include turning your on-prem storage into cloud storage that Suite accesses instead of that IBM or AWS business, since cloud is essentially just someone else's storage system. A plan to incorporate Suite properly would essentially eliminate Media Shuttle, Syncthing and Google Drive in one go.