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Comment by illumin8 | Hacker News Reader

Looks interesting, but S3 gives me both eventual or read after write consistency, as well as 11 9s of durability. Why would I use this instead?

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For one, this project is open source and can be installedon your own set of machines.

There is no way that's cheaper than s3 though.

Are you serious? It's definitely possible, and almost simple, to build a limited scale service that is cheaper than S3. S3 has the Amazon footprint behind it, which you can't compete against, but the price is not hard to beat.

Yes, but who will be on call to manage, monitor, and fix it when it breaks? Answer: you! S3 is one of those things that's so cheap and works so well I'd never think of leaving it.

If it came down to it, you can lease dx lines from AWS to your datacenter switch and get 10 Gbs to S3 for pretty cheap.

It is quite affordable until you have many files / objects.

But your company might have security requirements that prevent the use of S3.

For example, if you're a defense contractor that handles FOUO information, you can't just throw that on somebody else's cloud. You have to keep it entirely in-house.

Govcloud?

Only an option in the US.

There are other reasons other than cost that I can think of, physical security and ability to roll your own patches to name but two.

Sometimes it's not about being cheaper but about everything being under your own control.

Maybe you decide to move from AWS to own data center to reduce costs? This way the cost of moving is cheaper, since you don't have to modify applications that rely on S3 before moving.

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