About cost, see [1]. Also, S3 prices have been increasing and there's been a bunch of alternative offers for object store from other companies. I think people i

About cost, see [1]. Also, S3 prices have been increasing and there's been a bunch of alternative offers for object store from other companies. I think people in here (HN) comment often about increasing costs of AWS offerings. Distributed systems and consensus are inherently hard problem, but there are a lot of implementations that you can study (like Etcd that you mention, or NATS [2], which I've been playing with and looks super cool so far :-p) if you want to understand the internals, on top of many books and papers released. Again, I never said it was "easy" to build distributed systems, I just don't think there's any esoteric knowledge to what S3 provides. -- 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale 2: https://nats.io/ https://nats.io/