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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

S3 is anything but simple.

Here's simple protocol:

  PUT /my/key
  Content-Type: plain/text

  Hello, world


  GET /my/key

Did you ever tried to use S3 without libraries? Did you ever checked size of AWS SDK? It's incredibly overengineered.

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The S3 is that simple. Only complication is AWS auth, but you can easily do stuff on S3 with e.g. plain curl:

$ curl \ -H 'Content-type: text/plain' \ --aws-sigv4 'aws:amz:eu-west-1:s3' \ -u "$AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID":"$AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY" \ -H "x-amz-security-token: $AWS_SESSION_TOKEN" \ -XPUT --data 'hello world' \ https://mybucket.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/my/key

$ curl \ --aws-sigv4 'aws:amz:eu-west-1:s3' \ -u "$AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID":"$AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY" \ -H "x-amz-security-token: $AWS_SESSION_TOKEN" \ https://mybucket.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/my/key

just works.

Wow. I didn't realize curl had AWS auth baked in. That would have made my life a lot easier a few months ago.

"S3 is that simple, here's an example using an otherwise generic HTTP library specifically altered to deal with AWS's tiresome boilerplate complexity".

I don't like putting words in other people's mouths, but that really does seem like a fair paraphrasing of your comment.

You conveniently left out of your paraphrasing the "Only complication is AWS auth" part...

That's leaning a lot on curl's implementation of "--aws-sigv4", which is not simple.

S3 does handle authentication by giving you a temporary upload URL so your bucket isn't wide open. But I agree it isn't the simplest solution.

AWS SDK is huge yes, but you can implement an S3 client in 300 lines of Java.

https://github.com/Peergos/Peergos/blob/master/src/peergos/s...

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