AWS S3: how cheap discs became durable storage at scale
· 15 min read
When people first hear about Amazon S3, they usually think of it as “cloud file storage.”
That description is convenient, but architecturally misleading.
S3 is not a giant hard drive in the sky. It is not a shared folder. It is not a filesystem with infinite space. And it is almost certainly not just a pile of premium SSDs waiting to serve your objects.
A better mental model is this:
S3 is a massive distributed object storage system that converts unreliable commodity hardware into durable, highly available, high-throughput storage through software, redundancy, metadata systems, erasure coding, checksums, repair loops, and extreme parallelism.