6 ms·
Amazon S3 quietly deprecates BitTorrent support
- 22c 5y agoSeems out of character for AWS to deprecate something without at least notifying customers of a schedule. Does this commit even reflect that BitTorrent support is being dropped?
- jxramos 5y agoyah, just looks like 58 markdown files were edited. Maybe remove from documentation first then begin to remove functionality. But if it was in the documentation at any point you know you can only stay in such and such version of software.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- moonchild 5y ago> Does this commit even reflect that BitTorrent support is being dropped? Yes; more direct link: https://github.com/awsdocs/amazon-s3-userguide/commit/0d1759880ccb1818ab0f14129ba1321c519d2ac1#diff-72be9d82d9be9bda6a297a4fbd11aca66ecde97e4f90de6f86bdf95c5f6b72c0 https://github.com/awsdocs/amazon-s3-userguide/commit/0d1759...
- datasage 5y ago>> As of April 29, 2021 Amazon S3 is discontinuing the S3 BitTorrent feature and it will no longer be available to enable\. AWS will support customers currently using the S3 BitTorrent feature for 12 months\. After April 29, 2022, BitTorrent clients will no longer connect to Amazon S3\.
- darknavi 5y ago> As of April 29, 2021 Amazon S3 is discontinuing the S3 BitTorrent feature and it will no longer be available to enable. AWS will support customers currently using the S3 BitTorrent feature for 12 months. After April 29, 2022, BitTorrent clients will no longer connect to Amazon S3. Seems like this is the notification.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- foota 5y agoSeems neat, but I'm sure this form of hosting attracts fraud and is probably difficult to maintain.
- ComputerGuru 5y agoI’m not sure how you arrived at that conclusion. I can’t find a harder way to spam than this.
- foota 5y agoSpam isn't the only kind of fraud?
- ComputerGuru 5y agoPardon. I meant to say abuse, not spam.
- rektide 5y agoif they're going to deprecate the thing, i feel like they have an obligation to at least state why. letting random joe's from the internet chime in with sympathies explaining why they agree with the decision to remove good well used technology doesn't feel quite up the the bar i'd like to see for technologies being removed.
- andrewguenther 5y agoIf AWS is deprecating something, then it's likely that literally no one was using it and the few that might have been were given complimentary consulting to move them off of it.
- bpodgursky 5y agoYes, exactly. I get a billion messages a year about obscure lambda runtimes expiring for junk I provisioned half a decade ago and haven't ever invoked. There's no way this had any real users if it is being quietly turned off.
- belval 5y agoThis probably means that no-one was actually using this feature to an extent that it was not even worth putting an announcement out.
- takeda 5y agoProbably, I had no idea there was a tracker support, never seen any option to control it.
- JeremyBanks 5y agoI evaluated it for possible use ~5 years ago, and found it too unreliable. Their trackers would shut down after some period of inactivity and didn't often seem to come back online for later peers. AWS neglected this feature.
- DaftDank 5y agoSorry for the stupid question, but how was this used previously? You could just set all your torrents to download to Amazon's cloud?
- jes5199 5y agothe other way - S3 could seed directly to a torrent, I think
- takeda 5y agoFor example Linux distro could provide a DVD image. When your users would chose to use torrent you could get huge savings in bandwidth if file is popular, also the users would enjoy higher throughput.
- staticassertion 5y agoI'm not knowledgeable on bittorrent but I feel like it should still be 'compatible' (with a shim layer) with S3, just maybe not natively.
- KingMachiavelli 5y agoYou should still be able to effectively use S3 via Webseeds - the Bittorrent protocol specifies including http sources in your torrent file. The only big issue is that not all torrent clients support it.
- Sunspark 5y agoIf doing this stops someone from their precious, they will update their clients right away.
- banana_giraffe 5y agoI don't know of the internals, but on the surface there were three things this did: A torrent creator. This is a simple extension to the REST endpoint of S3, and a specific S3 API, that'd scan a S3 object to create the torrent file, and register the resulting infohash with a tracker. A tracker. Technically not necessary, but with the implementation AWS went with, they needed to run their own tracker to allow peers to discover each other. A seed peer. This was probably a shim on S3 (if I recall correctly, the IP was within the S3 range of IPs). This was responsible for speaking BitTorrent and always having the objects available for clients to download. There are other ways to do this, but I'm sure this pile of tech was a source of abuse and problems for basically no one to use, so I'm not surprised to see it go. I also seem to recall there was a single tracker, and AWS really wants to get rid of single entry points to S3.
- croddin 5y agoIt already says: > Amazon S3 does not support the BitTorrent protocol in AWS Regions launched after May 30, 2016\. So BitTorrent support has been sort of deprecated for a long time.
- edoceo 5y agoCommenting for visibility. Its much ado about old news. Upvote the parent.
- scubbo 5y ago> Commenting for visibility Can you elaborate? Do you believe that HN's algorithm prioritizes "comments that have replies" more highly?
- lamontcg 5y agohuman eyeballs sorta do
- TheRealPomax 5y agoHuman nature is going to give those comments more upvotes, which automatically moves them to "top comment" position, so at the risk of being facetious: yes, obviously?
- scubbo 5y agoIf you're claiming that upvotes on replies count against the ranking of the parent comment - I didn't know that, thank you! If you're claiming that replies can be "top comment" - I don't think that's true, but I've learned that HN has a lot of secret UI and features that are only unlocked at certain reputation levels, so maybe you're a higher-level Laser Lotus than I am. If you are claiming that "comments with replies" are more likely to garner upvotes _because of_ those replies - I don't believe that's true. I can't remember ever having read a reply and then going back to upvote the parent. If you're claiming that "comments with replies" are more likely to garner upvotes due to some shared underlying cause ("good comments get replies, good comments get upvotes") - while that's probably true, it doesn't affect my question of "why would you leave a comment that _just_ says 'upvoting for visibility'?", if that doesn't affect the underlying comment's ranking?
- rrdharan 5y agoI thought HN swore to me that AWS never deprecates anything ever? What’s next, SimpleDB?
- mappu 5y agoThis is somewhat of a non-issue, S3 can still be used in a a .torrent file by entering a raw HTTP URL as a Web Seed.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wowhelp 5y agoCorporate products will never support free speech the way it needs to be supported. Sure this is an opinion but also a PROOF.
- banana_giraffe 5y agoI actually had a use case that would have made sense to use this, in theory, but the implementation left a lot to be desired. The tracker Amazon ran was really trigger happy to ban peers (I'm sure it saw tons of bad actors, but still, it made testing really painful especially if you were churning infohashes as you tested new objects). And the seed was somehow painfully slow. Never once did any of my test scenarios see faster downloads than just downloading from S3. Maybe if I got some critical mass of users seeding, but since I couldn't get stats out of the tracker, I had no way to encourage users with gold stars or whatever. And, on top of all of this, since you couldn't create a multiple-file torrent with this, you had to really work around silly limitations.
- busymom0 5y agoGenuinely curious as I could be totally wrong on this - didn't p2p video streaming sites like Peertube use Webtorrent with S3? Also I think many Linux distro rely on it? Other than self hosting it, what other data services offer this support going forward?
- andyxor 5y agodisks are cheap, residential bandwidth is cheap, AWS and s3 are crazy expensive to use for torrenting
- SilverRed 5y agoI think the idea was that you could host a file as a torrent but use S3 as an always online source for the file so you can distribute the .torrent without worrying about all peers being offline at some point since s3 would always be online. In theory it would be cheaper than the alternative of just giving a link on s3