[Someone]

FTA: The design assumes S3 eventual consistency is your enemy

S3 has done better than that since December 2020. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-update-strong-rea...:

“Effective immediately, all S3 GET, PUT, and LIST operations, as well as operations that change object tags, ACLs, or metadata, are now strongly consistent. What you write is what you will read, and the results of a LIST will be an accurate reflection of what’s in the bucket. This applies to all existing and new S3 objects, works in all regions, and is available to you at no extra charge! There’s no impact on performance, you can update an object hundreds of times per second if you’d like, and there are no global dependencies”

[emmawirt]

yeah you're totally right, good catch. S3 has been strongly consistent since 2020. That weakens the specific framing but the broader point about Iceberg's design assumptions still holds: the architecture was built for a world of eventual consistency and massive concurrent writes, and a lot of that complexity doesn't disappear just because S3 improved. But I should have been more precise there, appreciate the correction.