The article states:<p><pre><code> 1956: a 3.75MB drive cost $9k
2024: 26TB drives exist, where 1TB costs $15
</code></pre>
I think that radically understates the cost of storage in 1956, when people used mercury delay lines, drum drives, core memory, williams tubes, etc. 1956 was a long time ago and stuff done back then was physically huge, microscopic "modern" units and enormously expensive. Thank goodness photolithography and being able to scale semiconductor transistors...<p>It apparently cost $3200 per month to lease one of them [1] so actually a storage payment model akin to S3...<p>[1] <a href="https://www.dataclinic.co.uk/history-snapshot-1956-the-worlds-first-moving-head-hard-disk-drive/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dataclinic.co.uk/history-snapshot-1956-the-world...</a>
The thing that people don't realize about AWS is that the hard part, and the thing they do really well, are authorization and billing.<p>Every call is authenticated. Changes to authorization ripple across AWS in realtime. If you revoke a priv, things stop working immediately. That's incredibly hard to do, especially when you're authenticating billions of requests a second.<p>For billing and telemetry, everything's is logged. There are companies that are built on the idea of logging, and at AWS it's just something they do - without slowing anything down.<p>AWS just might be one of the most complicated things humanity has ever built, which is a weird thought.
There's very little "behind" here, just a bunch of speculation on public articles, many of which are recent and not about how S3 scaled.
> When you aggregate on a large enough scale, a single workload cannot influence the aggregate peak.<p>This is also the “power” behind snowflake and bigquery.
One of the crazy parts about S3 which is not touched on in this post is how it's becoming a file transfer protocol in its own right. Every cloud vendor now has an S3 compatible interface, but when you look deeper into the actual http contract behind the S3 spec, I don't understand how one can shit on FTP and webdav as a protocol and S3 not receive worse treatment. I don't want to be reminiscent of the Dropbox FTP deal on HN, but I hope one day people will steer toward open protocols and stop shitting on open ones for reasons that quite frankly 99% of the people couldn't give much of a shit about.