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by TheColorYellow 692 days ago
Because at this point it's a well known API. I bet people want to recreate AWS without the Amazon part, and so this is for them.

Which, to your point, makes no sense because as you rightly point out, people use S3 because of the Amazon services and ecosystem it is integrated with - not at all because it is "good tech"
2 comments
acdha 692 days ago
S3 was the second AWS service, behind SQS, and saw rapid adoption which cannot be explained by integration with services introduced later.
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vlovich123 692 days ago
Storage is generally sticky but I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss that reason because it might explain why anything would fail to displace it; a bunch of software is written against S3 and the entire ecosystem around it is quite rich. It doesn’t explain the initial popularity but does explain stickiness. Initial popularity was because it was the first good REST API to do cloud storage AND the price was super reasonable.
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acdha 691 days ago
Oh, I’m definitely not saying integration or compatibility have nothing to do with it - only that “horrible interface with a terrible lack of features” seems impossible to reconcile with its immense popularity.
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vlovich123 690 days ago
First mover + ecosystem wins over interface. And also, I really don’t have so many issues with the interface as others seem to and we had to implement it from scratch for R2. There’s features we extended on top of S3 so it’s not really the interface so much but rather that Amazon doesn’t really invest in adding features so much. I suspect it’s really hard for them to do so. We also exposed a native JS API that was more ergonomic but the S3 endpoint saw more traffic which again points to the ecosystem advantage - people have an S3 codebase and want to do as a drop in replacement as possible.
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acdha 689 days ago
They weren’t the first mover on either object storage or storage over HTTP.
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vlovich123 689 days ago
They were first mover for cloud storage and combining object storage with HTTP. Previous attempts were WebDAV (not object storage and very complicated to the point that kk one implemented) and Hadoop which didn’t have HTTP and couldn’t scale like S3’s design.
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otabdeveloper4 691 days ago
S3 is just HTTP. There isn't really an ecosystem for S3, unless you just mean all the existing http clients.
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