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Comment by southerntofu | Hacker News Reader

I assume because we already have plenty of amazing standards for networked file systems (half a dozen are listed on the linked page) and apart from Amazon almost nobody uses S3 protocol?

This is a product targeted for sysadmins, who are familiar with ftp(s), sftp/scp, rsync, webdav... or at least one of those. The day S3 protocol becomes useful for interop with other software, storage vendors like hetzner will probably adopt it.

Is there anything good/special about S3 protocol that would make it worth supporting? I don't know, but in the present time when i see some tool claiming S3-compatibility i always wonder why? Why make it easier for Amazon and other clown computing providers (spot the typo) to continue eating away selfhosting as a practice, and whatever's left of online digital rights along with it? I'd rather let/help their proprietary mainframe and protocols die, but i may be missing something.

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Most companies that went in early on the cloud implemented S3. By providing an S3 compatible API, a storage provider can make it extremely easy for companies to switch.

You don't even need to support the full API for this purpose as a very common use case is just uploading files for backups.

No one is arguing for S3 to become the one new standard, it is more like supporting the most common import/export file type in Photoshop/Blender.

If you have existing running processes in place and all you need to update is connection string and auth to save a ton of money then you are much more likely to do so.

> it is more like supporting the most common import/export file type in Photoshop/Blender

I understand the rationale, but Photoshop/Blender files are very common in their respective space. In comparison, the proportion of people using S3 protocol vs NFS/FTP/SFTP is insignificant (i don't have stats).

> If you have existing running processes in place and all you need to update is connection string and auth to save a ton of money then you are much more likely to do so.

Good point! But do companies using cloud storage really want to save on costs? If they did, there were already much cheaper storage solutions long before Amazon S3 existed so why go with S3 in the first place? Amazon's pricing is confusing for storage costs, but for sure 0.09$/GB egress is a much higher cost than most providers (90$/TB ?! that's very much the price of an entire 1TB hard drive!).

Amazon "cloud" is just vendor lock-in and i'm personally a little uneasy to encourage anyone to support their tooling because who's gonna benefit from that apart from Amazon? Certainly not the hundreds of maintainers who'll have to spend countless hours to implement/maintain these new protocols who from my understanding don't bring any new useful feature.

A bunch of software supports S3, especially backup software. It's nice to have something standard to use.

A lot of backup software natively supports S3 like APIs now. Even open source like duplicati, kopia, etc.

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