Amazon S3

“It's cheaper to pay S3 to deal with the problem than to have a full team dealing with bit rot from RAID issues.”

“AWS have found the ideal captive market: computer engineers who don't know how computers work or how much they should cost.”

“it's a extremely reliable, infinitely-scalable, strongly consistent (in some implementation), cheap, and extremely simple to use key-value store”

“The range of things you can do with blob storage and a (very simple) auth model are surprisingly broad.”

“it is advertised as eleven nines durability, however. That is better than anything you can build yourself”

“Why did you claim that the high price is to cover the costs if 99.9% of it isn't covering the costs?”

“I finally stopped using (S)FTP when i realized that all the ftp clients now have native support for S3”

“For reference transit cost has dropped over the years and is now about at $0.000247/GB or free if there is a peering agreement”

“S3 is still magnitudes cheaper, faster, and more redundant than anything you could put together yourself”

“I use S3 (well GCS mostly) for data that I wouldn’t be upset if it’s lost. And I pay the zonal discount for it.”

“S3 is and was an amazing resource for normal people. Extremely reliable cloud storage for backup, for distribution, for anything”

“a cloud backup (think s3 or azure blob) with credentials that can't be harvested automatically by a malware”

“Their metrics are, quite honestly, absolutely impossible for most engineering teams and companies to ever achieve”

“The quiet improvements to S3 over the last 3 years like conditional puts unlocked a lot of use cases not previously feasible”

“the coordination layer/control-plane is all S3 CAS of dumb json files, which is a fantastic common-mode infra requirement”

“the cloud provider managed services for e.g. blob stores or databases are so much more reliable”

“That's how far s3 has come - it's replacing products that were the pinnacle of scalability back in the day.”

“S3 is strongly consistent, if you need it anyways you can just use s3 keys to deconflict and store the workflow state.”

“S3 is pretty competitive if you want similarly-performing storage with consistent millisecond-level latency”

“Even teams that use prefixes for performance don't have an S3-native way to ask what a prefix represents”

“trying to fix the monthly bleed with a Lifecycle Policy nearly had a seven figure charge on top of it all”

“Another weird thing is that `foo/` is a valid object name in s3, so you can have both `foo/` and `foo` be different files.”

“It gives a nice limited surface area that doesn't allow you to do things that can get too complex”

“there were also some implementation specifics like throughput limits based on key prefixes (that one vanished circa 2016)”

“It can be unprofessional to design a system that takes an external variable like S3 for granted, especially if it's not needed.”

“decision to make bucket (and not bucket + account id surrogate) a sole key for access was one of most annoying mistakes”

“S3 CAS conditional writes changed the game for building coordination primitives on object storage”

“S3-compatible object storage as the substrate is a nice escape from the operational complexity of running Redis or SQS”

“a myriad of intermediate steps are introduced to write data to dynamo/s3/kinesis + sqs/and coordination”

“S3 also gives you multipart parallel uploads. Each part gets stored and then when you're done the concatenation is performed close to the storage layer.”

“the site didn't need to be updated once built so serving a load of static files via S3 makes ongoing maintenance very low”

“There are no alternatives that support most of the AWS S3 functionality such as replication, event notifications.”

“Once in S3, triggers start a series of lambdas to decrypt, decompress, analysis. Works well, easy to reason about.”

“Either you use something like the S3 interface, or you waste your time implementing a clone of what S3 already supports.”

“the way our software works is 95% cheaper to run using S3 as the storage rather than DynamoDB”

“I suspect they learned a lot over the years and the API shows the scars. In their defense, they did go first.”

“Originally the first S stood for "Simple". With all the additions they've had to bolt on, S2 would be far more appropriate a name.”

“Everything uses poorly documented, sometimes inconsistent HTTP headers that read like afterthoughts/tech debt.”

“The nice thing about S3 is even if you screw up your usage patterns, you can pay/engineer your way out guaranteed.”

“S3 is an amazingly engineered product, operates at truly impressive scale, is quite reasonably priced”