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Going on a tangent here but why s3? Why not avoid vendor lock in and just serve static files?

My setup is to post blobs over a small rest api which balances storage load over all the file servers using nginx. It responds with the serverSubdomainId which in turn gets saved in the database. So the url for file access can be generated https://{serverSubdomainId}.domain.tld/{resourceId} The only costly part is writing which with caching of available storage of all the servers isn’t bad. The whole system is horizontally and vertically scalable. What am I missing that s3 is still the defacto even with vendor lock in and high egress costs?



There are plenty of oss solutions that talk "s3", like swift, ceph and seaweedfs.

Why object storage? Its easier to backup, version and to scale horizontally. Most solutions will also provide encryption capabilities that can be commanded either via external key management systems or from the client application. Also, custom access policies are great for private documents and file uploads.

Using static files is a good solution in some cases, nothing against it. But in many scenarios, there are huge benefits on using object storage instead, even if it is quite slower.


"S3" is often used to refer to any S3 compatible object storage system. You can even self-host it with something like MinIO.


I can't speak for everyone but, in my case, it comes down to the ease of setup and having someone else manage it.




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