In S3 simplicity is table stakes • Hacker News Board

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#101

Post by shawabawa3 » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 9:26 PM UTC

1a527dd5 wrote: post #99

StratusBen wrote: post #95

For those interested in S3 Tables which is referenced in this blog post, we literally just published this overview on what they are and cost considerations of them that people might find interesting: https://www.vantage.sh/blog/amazon-s3-tables

https://www.vantage.sh/blog/amazon-s3-tables#s3-tables-cost I can't make head or tails of the beginning of this sentence:- > Pricing for S3 Tables is all and all not bad. Otherwise lovely article!

"all and all" is a typo for "all in all" which means "overall", or "taking everything into consideration"

So they are saying the pricing is not bad considering everything it does

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#102

Post by lizknope » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 9:31 PM UTC

Clicked on the article thinking it was about S3 Graphics, the company that made the graphics chip in my first PC. Now I see it's some amazon cloud storage thing.

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#103

Post by eternityforest » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 10:17 PM UTC

victorp13 wrote: post #16

_fat_santa wrote: post #11

S3 is up there as one of my favorite tech products ever. Over the years I've used it for all sorts of things but most recently I've been using it to roll my own DB backup system. One of the things that shocks me about the system is the level of object durability. A few years ago I was taking an AWS certification course and learned that their durability number means that one can expect to loose data about once every 1…

> Last thing I'll say is, you know your API is good when "S3 compatable API" is a selling point of your competitors. Counter-point: You know that you're the dominant player. See: .psd, .pdf, .xslx. Not particularly good file types, yet widely supported by competitor products.

Most people use libraries to read and write the files, and judge them pretty much entirely by popularity.

A very popular file format pretty much defines the semantics and feature set for that category in everyone's mind, and if you build around those features, then you can probably expect good compatibility.

Nobody thinks about the actual on disk data layout, they think about standardization and semantics.

I rather like PDF, although it doesn't seem to be well suited for 500MB scans of old books and the like, they really seem to bog down on older mobile devices.

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#104

Post by 8organicbits » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 10:27 PM UTC

Gys wrote: post #25

_fat_santa wrote: post #11

S3 is up there as one of my favorite tech products ever. Over the years I've used it for all sorts of things but most recently I've been using it to roll my own DB backup system. One of the things that shocks me about the system is the level of object durability. A few years ago I was taking an AWS certification course and learned that their durability number means that one can expect to loose data about once every 1…

> their durability number means that one can expect to loose data about once every 10,000 years What does that mean? If I have 1 million objects, I loose 100 per year?

Isn't it just a marketing number? I didn't think durability was part of the S3 SLA, for example.

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#105

Post by kevindamm » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 10:42 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #51

chasd00 wrote: post #44

S3 was one of the first offerings coming out of AWS right? It’s pretty legendary and a great concept to begin with. You can tell by how much sense it makes and then trying to wrap your ahead around the web dev world pre-S3.

? The web dev world pre-S3 was pretty much the same, but you stored your files on a regular server (and set up your own redundancy and backup strategy). Not that much different to be honest from an end user's point of view.

At a lot of places there wasn't even a redundancy nor backup strategy, so it really was just as simple as registering with a hosting company and ssh+ftp (or cPanel or something like that for what amounted to the managed solutions of the time).

I agree, things before S3 weren't really that different. LAMP stacks everywhere, and developer skills were very portable between different deployments of these LAMP stacks. Single machines didn't scale as much then, but for most small-medium sites they really didn't need to.

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#106

Post by progbits » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 11:26 PM UTC

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #96

> When we moved S3 to a strong consistency model, the customer reception was stronger than any of us expected. This feels like one of those Apple-like stories about inventing and discovering an amazing, brand new feature that delighted customers but not mentioning the motivating factor of the competing products that already had it. A more honest sentence might have been "After years of customers complaining that the…

I mainly use GCP but keep hearing how great AWS is in comparison.

Imagine my surprise when porting some GCS code to S3 last year and realizing there is no way to get consistency guarantees without external lock service.

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#107

Post by Kab1r » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 11:35 PM UTC

> S3 launched as the first public AWS service.

Didn't SQS launch publicly earlier than S3?

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#108

Post by PantaloonFlames » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 11:45 PM UTC

ginko wrote: post #7

Would have been good if they mentioned they meant Amazon S3. It took me a while to figure out what this was about. Initially I thought this was about S3 standby mode.

All things distributed - the source of the headline - is a blog written by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#109

Post by deanCommie » Fri, Mar 14, 2025, 11:50 PM UTC

Kab1r wrote: post #107

> S3 launched as the first public AWS service. Didn't SQS launch publicly earlier than S3?

SQS went into beta first, S3 went "GA" first.

AWS typically considers the "GA" milestone as the "public launch" date, which is silly because the criteria for what is good enough for GA has changed over the years.

Re: In S3 simplicity is table stakes

#110

Post by klysm » Sat, Mar 15, 2025, 12:45 AM UTC

progbits wrote: post #106

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #96

> When we moved S3 to a strong consistency model, the customer reception was stronger than any of us expected. This feels like one of those Apple-like stories about inventing and discovering an amazing, brand new feature that delighted customers but not mentioning the motivating factor of the competing products that already had it. A more honest sentence might have been "After years of customers complaining that the…

I mainly use GCP but keep hearing how great AWS is in comparison. Imagine my surprise when porting some GCS code to S3 last year and realizing there is no way to get consistency guarantees without external lock service.

Distributed locks are a lie