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Ask HN: Will you hope S3 become a real file system?

5 points by daviesliu ↗ HN
In AWS, S3 is the de facto best storage, we are using it everywhere. After using it more and more, lacking some important feature or sematics really hurted us:

1) eventual consistency, do not known whether it's consistent or not, could result in wrong answer for analytics.

2) lacking of cheap/atomic rename, also symlink, it's painful to manage huge amount of data.

EFS is great, but can only be accessed from same VPC, also too expensive. Setuping up a DFS (GlusterFS/Ceph/MooseFS) in the cloud is also expensive and hard to manage.

ObjectiveFS looks great, after tried out, it still kind of eventual consistent from distributed system's point view(other nodes can't see the updates immediately). A distributed version of S3QL will be great.

Are you also hoping to have a solution that's as easy and scalable as S3, but also provide the same ACID guarantee as file system? If you know a solution like that, please leave a comment, thanks!

6 comments

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gesman
I am not willing to pay $ per byte of storage or per minute of CPU time, no matter how buzzwordy the technology is.

Flat fee offerings will be an enabler, not the technological advancement.

daviesliu
ObjectiveFS does provide a flat fee ($15 per client), is that what you what?

If the $ per byte of storage is relatively small comparing to the cost of S3, I actually like that model, pay as you go.

Someone
That flat fee sounded enticing, so I had to Google it. Flat fee? https://objectivefs.com/price?l=pricing:

"AWS S3 and Google GCS charges are not included."

It only seems to be flat fee if you store your data on your own server and even then, I would quote 'flat fee', as your costs will go up when you add storage. You also take responsibility for backing up the data.

gesman
PS: that's why i use crashplan for backups.

It's on-server-encrypted, version controlled, supports all platforms including Linux and also flat fee-ed.

jaxondu
I hope S3 will stay the same and get cheaper each years. It is meant to be the foundation. That's why you have Dropbox built on top of it.