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Comment by VHRanger | Hacker News Reader

The S3 API doesn't work like normal filesystem APIs.

Part of it is that it follows the object storage model, and part of it is just to lock people into AWS once they start working with it.

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What kind of vendor lock-in do you even talk about. Their API is public knowledge, AWS publishes the spec, there are multiple open source reference client implementations available on GitHub, there are multiple alternatives supporting the protocol, you can find writings from AWS people as high in hierarchy as Werner Vogels about internals. Maybe you could say that some s3 features with no alternative implementation in alternative products are a lock-in. I would consider it a „competitive advantage”. YMMV.

Apart from all these other products that implement s3? MinIO, Ceph (RGW), Garage, SeaweedFS, Zenko CloudServer, OpenIO, LakeFS, Versity, Storj, Riak CS, JuiceFS, Rustfs, s3proxy.

Riak CS been dead for over a decade which makes me question the rest. Some of these also do not have the same behaviors when it comes to paths (MinIO is one of those IIRC).

Also, none of them implement full S3 API and features.

What does RadosGW miss?

There's a difference between S3 API spec and what Amazon does with S3 - for isntance, the new CAS capabilities with Amazon are not part of the spec.

Ceph certainly implements the full API spec, though it may lag behind some changes. It's mostly a question of engineering time available to the projects to keep up with changes.

> There's a difference between S3 API spec and what Amazon does with S3 - for isntance, the new CAS capabilities with Amazon are not part of the spec.

Sure, but those are S3 APIs and features that provided by AWS. We not talking about S3 spec, we're talking about s3 product.

You’re wrong. “Implementing the S3 API” means the spec, not an Amazon product.

We're talking about using AWS S3 and using something that implements S3 spec. Really not that hard to understand.

When customer wants to switch away from AWS S3, customer cares about AWS S3 feature coverage and not the spec.

Spec and features are intertwined. Customers who switch away from AWS S3 still want to use the same SDKs, libraries, etc that support S3 API. They don't want to rewrite their applications to use a new API. So then is it feature coverage or spec coverage?

It's both? Customer doesn't care if spec is 100% covered if feature that they are using in AWS S3 isn't supported.

Also, who is rewriting their application to change interaction with an object storage? People that directly use some S3 sdk all around the app should read a book on software engineering or at least a blog post.

Wrong again. Not only have I worked on DigitalOcean’s S3 implementation but I currently work on an open source product that targets S3 spec and can be used with any cloud provider and any other spec-compliant drop-in, like Garage.

All that means: you only used AWS S3 features that are in the S3 spec.

Add Tigris to the list as well please.

We maintain a page that shows our compatibility with S3 API. It's at https://www.tigrisdata.com/docs/api/s3/. The test runner is open source at https://github.com/tigrisdata-community/s3-api-compat-tests

I'm 100% aware of how S3 works. I was questioning why the S3 API is needed when the service is using local storage.

Sometimes API compatibility is an important detail.

I've worked at a few places where single-node K8s "clusters" were frequently used just because they wanted the same API everywhere.

The API has sort of become a standard. There are many providers providing S3 API-compatible storage.

> part of it is just to lock people into AWS once they start working with it.

This is some next-level conspiracy theory stuff. What exactly would the alternative have been in 2006? S3 is one of the most commonly implemented object storage APIs around, so if the goal is lock-in, they're really bad at it.

> What exactly would the alternative have been in 2006?

Well, WebDAV (Document Authoring and Versioning) had been around for 8 years when AWS decided they needed a custom API. And what service provider wasn't trying to lock you into a service by providing a custom API (especially pre-GPT) when one existed already? Assuming they made the choice for a business benefit doesn't require anything close to a conspiracy theory.

And it worked as a moat until other companies and open source projects started cloning the API. See also: Microsoft.

WebDAV is ass tho. I don't remember a single positive experience with anything using it.

And still need redundant backend giving it as API

When I was in school, we had a SkunkDAV setup that department secretaries were supposed to use to update websites... supporting that was no fun at all. I'm not sure why it was so painful (was 25 years ago) but it left a bad taste in my mouth.

WebDAV is kinda bad, and back then it was a big deal that corporate proxies wouldn't forward custom HTTP methods. You could barely trust PUT to work, let alone PROPFIND.

When S3 launched the core API could be described with 4 requests. It was (and still mostly is) super simple.

Saying they should have used WebDAV instead shows a lack of knowledge on your end rather than theirs.

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