AWS S3 is 'pushing to become primary storage for a lot of applications'
re:Invent We speak to Andy Warfield, AWS distinguished engineer
Storage
12 Dec 2023 | 6
Files are not static
The slickest piece of evasion here is talking about files as though they were the same thing as Objects, just with different metadata attributes.
The fundamental difference is that files are updated very differently than how objects are updated.
Objects are put, as a whole, in a conceptual instant.
Files have a series of writes applied at different offsets, each conceptually at one instant. But there are
complex rules governing when each of those updates can and may be visible to other reading the file.
If you access files as though they were object, which most file access does, then it is easy to map a file to an object. The only difficulties come when you play games like renaming hierarchical directories.
Figuring out exactly how much of the file system semantics to support with objects is a tricky issue. Most end users do not yet fully understand the tradeoffs so it is not surprising that we do not know their preferences yet.
This sort of double-talk from Swiftstack does not help the process.
Promoting placing its clumsy ring on flash is particularly pathetic. It's a data structure that is not needed; its main impact is to delay when the cluster responds permanently to changed membership. Optimizing your achilles heel does not make it a feature.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
