alt Hacker News?
Its like GET <namespace>/object, PUT <namespace>/object. To me its the most obvious mapping of HTTP to immutable object key value storage you could imagine.
It is bad that the control plane responses can be malformed XML (e.g keys are not escaped right if you put XML control characters in object paths) but that can be forgiven as an oversight.
Its not perfect but I don't think its a strange API at all.
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It gets complex with ACLs for permissions, lifecycle controls, header controls and a bunch of other features that are needed on S3 scale but not at smaller provider scale.
And many S3-compatible alternatives (probably most but the big ones like Ceph) don't implement all of the features.
For example for lifecycles backblaze have completely different JSON syntax
Last I checked the user guide to the API was 3500 pages.
3500 pages to describe upload and download, basically. That is pretty strange in my book.
Everything uses poorly documented, sometimes inconsistent HTTP headers that read like afterthoughts/tech debt. An S3 standard implementation has to have amazon branding all over it (x-amz) which is gross.
HTTP isn't really a great back plane for object storage.
!!!
I’ve seen a lot of bad takes and this is one of them.
Listing keys is weird (is it V1 or V2)?
The authentication relies on an obtuse and idiosyncratic signature algorithm.
And S3 in practice responds with malformed XML, as you point out.
Protocol-wise, I have trouble liking it over WebDAV. And that's depressing.
That may be what S3 is like, but what the S3 API is is this: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go-v2/service/s3
My browser prints that out to 413 pages with a naive print preview. You can squeeze it to 350 pretty reasonably with a bit of scaling before it starts getting to awfully small type on the page.
Yes, there's a simple API with simple capabilities struggling to get out there, but pointing that out is merely the first step on the thousand-mile journey of determining what, exactly, that is. "Everybody uses 10% of Microsoft Word, the problem is, they all use a different 10%", basically. If you sat down with even 5 relevant stakeholders and tried to define that "simple API" you'd be shocked what you discover and how badly Hyrum's Law will bite you even at that scale.