Parquet files are smaller than row based storage in a database (but not those databases with focus on strong compression).
And for backup - the files are probably easier to just copy to multiple disks for redundancy, as opposed to database dumps and incremental backups which at the Petabyte scale will be a pain.
So Ceph/SeaweedFS/RustFS/Garage are the alternatives I think
Also Apache licensing gives some peace of mind after the musical chair license game before they finally landed on only paid AIStor offering.
there is a reason why people develop for S3: a lot of enterprise data is there. people ingest there from various sources. and it's not just parquet usually, it's multivendor sources writing to an iceberg catalog.
nobody will run minio on AWS other than hobby projects and small demos.
I regularly work with iceberg datasets in the double digit TB range per dataset. keep that in mind when you think about sizes. databricks, snowflake, large enterprise vendors: they are targeting these sizes.
You realise not every company uses AWS for any/all its needs?
There are datacenters around the world owned by individual companies or co-located. And many companies still have servers on prem.
Compute and disks are getting more dense & liquid cooled, so less rack space is needed for same power.
And Minio and others can handle Petabytes+
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/servers-un...
Backblaze, Cloudflare R2 and other cheaper S3 compatible competitors also exist.
I've yet to met a Fortune 100 who isn't mostly using either on prem or a large hyperscaler (S3/Azure/GCS).
At this point S3 is a standard interface. All sorts of cloud providers and open-source projects provide S3. If you're on AWS, price isn't the reason. You pick AWS because you don't see your company taking a risk with anything else.
S3 doesn't mean expensive. AWS does. But AWS users are fully locked-in, they'll pay whatever the price is.
Have you ever spoken to a CTO? They most certainly are.
Also many are Microsoft houses so using Azure blob plus one of the reasons for Kubernetes/Openshift adoption was to be cloud neutral
Price is not the reason people chose AWS. Some companies use Azure. The current startup at $WORK uses yet another smaller Cloud. And yet AWS sill has the clear lead in market share. That's because price is far from the only factor, and not even the main factor.
That's not true. It's just the way things work "saving money" isn't part of the KPI. Enterprise teams get a budget. If you "saved" you don't get it back. So unless there's a legit need it's ALWAYS easier increasing than cutting it.
It's not about risk. It's about power. They are price sensitive but in a way that doesn't matter to the bottom line i.e. if I can cut my AWS storage bill by 10% and then spend it on random tokens I'd do it.