[dodobirdlord]

Buckets are globally addressable because they planned for each S3 bucket + object key to have an associated URL (actually several), and URLs are a global namespace.

http(s)://<bucket>.s3.amazonaws.com/<object> http(s)://s3.amazonaws.com/<bucket>/<object>

[jorblumesea]

urls would have to be global, but why buckets themselves? It seems like a many to one relationship would easily be possible.

[kevan]

Given the historical context (S3 launched 12 years ago, 5 months before EC2 launched with the us-east-1 region), it's reasonable that S3 buckets were global because regions didn't really exist yet as a concept.

If you look at the docs now[1], new buckets are regionalized and the region is in the URL for non-us-east-1 regions.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html#s3_...

[jorblumesea]

Got it, makes sense. So the only way you'd have a global bucket is if you created it before a certain date (whenever they were regional-ized, I assume). Thanks!