[Tharkun]

Not too long ago, we used S3 to serve large amounts of publicly available data in webapps. We had hundreds of buckets with URL style names. Then the TLS fairy came along. Google began punishing websites without HTTPS and browsers prevented HTTPS pages from loading HTTP iframes.

Suddenly we had two options. Use CloudFront with hundreds of SSL certs, at great expense (in time and additional AWS fees), or change the names of all buckets to something without dots.

But aaaaah, S3 doesn't support renaming buckets. And we still had to support legacy applications anf legacy customers. So we ended up duplicating some buckets as needed. Because, you see, S3 also doesn't support having multiple aliases (symlinks) for the same bucket.

Our S3 bills went up by about 50%, but that was a lot cheaper than the CloudFront+HTTPS way.

The cynic in me thinks not having aliases/symlinks in S3 is a deliberate money-grabbing tactic.