I do mean atomic, as a concept that includes durability and consistency. From Wikipedia: > An atomic transaction is an indivisible and irreducible series of da

I do mean atomic, as a concept that includes durability and consistency. From Wikipedia: > An atomic transaction is an indivisible and irreducible series of database operations such that either all occur, or nothing occurs. A guarantee of atomicity prevents updates to the database occurring only partially, which can cause greater problems than rejecting the whole series outright. That is, if I update index.html on S3, only some of their actual servers get the update right away, and some do no. Thus if I start downloading index.html from different parts of the world I will see either the old or the new version. Atomic does not necessarily imply multiple actions being bundled together, which is what you may be thinking of. For example the mv command on Linux is atomic: it renames a file and returns once the rename is complete. This is not the case with S3. Another way to think of it: atomic update to all the S3 servers at once instead of to just some of them.