It's almost always a better idea (and not much work) to write your own thin specialized glue layer between your application code and operating system APIs.
The problem is that it's actually really hard to write you own specialized glue layer,and so most developers who do that have poor implementations with low performance and/or incompatibilities with non-AWS solutions. In the context of object storage, we've found lots of applications have tried to add S3 support, and while they work with AWS S3 and have basic functionality, they fail on a lot of other S3-compatible solutions. So they end up tied to AWS, and you can't use them on Microsoft Azure Storage, or often on Google Cloud Storage (despite its S3 gateway), or others.
For instance, a key workhorse of the genomics field is `samtools`, which works with AWS S3 in some ways, but not others (like Amazon Resource Names[1]). Our approach works across vendors transparently, and on S3, is much faster compared to such native implementations.
[1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/reference-a...
The article is about POSIX compliance (or lack thereof) of storage systems.
And the article does not imply that “POSIX … sucks”. On the contrary: the answer to the rhetoric question in the title is obviously “no”.
> It's almost always a better idea … to write your own thin specialized glue layer between your application code and operating system APIs.
Oh, definitely. But writing good abstractions that work equally well with POSIX-compliant filesystems and with object storage is basically impossible without massive trade-offs. That’s the entire point of the product that’s advertised here: it provides a link between object storage and POSIX-compliant file access that manages these trade-offs extremely well, and it allows users to use their existing glue code for POSIX without having to deal with object storage altogether.
(COI disclaimer: I used to work on this product; but I no longer have any stakes in it, financial or otherwise.)