3 ms·

What's the difference between an 'object' and a file?

• pjc50 7y ago
  "Objects" in S3 are basically immutable. You can't overwrite the middle of an object or append to it - you can only overwrite the object as a a whole. This makes concurrent access much easier to reason about by making certain operations impossible. You couldn't build a database on an S3 object, for example. So you wouldn't want S3 as your only filesystem. But a combination of S3 semantics and block storage semantics covers the use cases of virtually all applications, with a bit of extra work to cover streaming writes.