S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past
S3's dominance in cloud architecture is built on hard disk assumptions that are now obsolete. SSDs offer 100-microsecond latency and millions of IOPS, making caching, batching, and separate metadata stores unnecessary. Yet cloud providers have little incentive to cannibalize their revenue, so we must build the SSD-based disaggregated storage ourselves.
The irony is that S3-based architecture is becoming the industry standard at precisely the time when the hardware constraints that motivated it are fading.
- simonw
One thing I find notable about S3 today is that, while it used to drop in price reasonably often, there hasn't been a price drop in a full decade:
2006-03-14 $0.150/GB-month
2010-11-01 $0.140/GB-month
2012-02-01 $0.125/GB-month
2012-12-01 $0.095/GB-month
2014-02-01 $0.085/GB-month
2014-04-01 $0.030/GB-month
2016-12-01 $0.023/GB-month
Today it's still $0.023/GB-month.
- richieartoul
Nice article. I agree that it is a bit of a shame that everything is forced to be so S3-centric (and I say that as someone whose work helped motivate a lot of people to do that), but right now its an unfortunate reality of running software in the cloud because cloud networking and SSDs are so expensive that you really are required to use S3 if you want a system that can handle "big data" scale workloads cost effectively
- hadlock
I finally stopped using (S)FTP when i realized that all the ftp clients now have native support for S3. It turns out if you have a business partner who wants to use sftp, 99.9% of the time of they upgrade their client, the upgrade has S3 support, and then you can just use modern tooling on your side. And when they finally automate, they can also use modern tooling.
- zokier
Right now it is not even clear how to interface with SSDs even on a single host, there has been all sorts of attempts to move away from the traditional plain block device model. NVMe has extensions for KV, ZNS, and FDP, all which offer different characteristics. And then there are of course open channel SSDs and some others too. I kinda expect the future foundational IO interface to be more S3-like than block-device or unixy filesystem-like.
- 0xCMP
The unfortunate part of that graph is that I think it's not updated for today's prices given the memory shortage/crunch we're experiencing that's driven up the prices for all kinds of memory.
But also while it should be faster than it is, how would an S3 designed around SSDs look differently to an API user? I would think the API is basically the same.
- MisterMunchkin
Has anyone figured out how glacier works yet? I wish they’d just tell us. I’d happily sign an NDA, I just want to know how it works!
I’d also like a “shitter” storage service. I.e no redundancy, no multi-AZ. Just really cheap storage for stuff I don’t really care about losing, so that I can store a bunch of stuff in bulk that can easily be recovered.
- d1l
We ran EBS for years. Finally the costs became ridiculous and we moved our entire dataset to S3. We’re saving 20k/month. There’s just no beating the price.
- bryzaguy
S3 is dead, long live S3