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I feel like I'm fairly familiar with the tradeoffs. I'm simply making an observation that it's interesting to me that filesystem access over HTTP isn't bigger t
by anderspitman 6y ago
I feel like I'm fairly familiar with the tradeoffs. I'm simply making an observation that it's interesting to me that filesystem access over HTTP isn't bigger than it is.
- dnautics 6y ago> filesystem access over HTTP isn't bigger than it is. I don't think it's a trade-off thing. It's conceptual; FS over HTTP is not bigger than it is because filesystems are a much more stateful concept that often has to support coordinative transactions (like locks) whereas HTTP is a stateless protocol by design, so there's fundamentally a mismatch. That's why HTTP is better matched for an object system like S3 which is capable of being transported over stateless links and gives fewer coordination guarantees and is only eventually consistent.
- anderspitman 6y agoYou can support locks for HTTP if you need them (WebDAV does), though I would argue they aren't necessary for a large number of useful tasks. You don't have to implement all the semantics of a filesystem in order to benefit. The main benefit comes from making a filesystem-like construct accessible in the browser. As I said before, Google Drive is a good example of this (and it's an object system, so that's an orthogonal issue), but it's a complicated protocol (as is S3) in a walled garden.