Say what you will about cloud, and I will say a lot more, but you can’t deny that it’s done a princely job of abstracting services from their underlying hardware.
Here I was, thinking that operating systems and for storage volume managers and (potentially distributed) file systems did that. ;)
Don’t get me wrong, the concept of object storage is nice, but that statement feels a bit silly. Distributing data and load, mechanisms for high availability, load balancing, HTTP APIs are all not things invented by the cloud and if you didn’t just run your hobby server it also was in use. What the cloud did and that I grant is maybe somewhat unintentionally and out of necessity and limitations standardize a lot of things. That’s really cool and I am very happy about that, but sometimes people almost make it sound like there was no proper server setup you could build before AWS came along. Just instead of paying your own people running it you outsource stuff and pay a third party and pay people to tell the third party what need, basically set up the specs for the contract via Terraform, etc. But I get get carried away.
I’m not sure they meant the protocol, but the service. And I suppose at any large scale it’s the best example of “not-only-privately-accessible file storage (service)” we have
I sometimes think about the fact that Amazon S3 effectively has to exist until the heat death of the universe. Many millennia from now, our highly-evolved descendants will probably be making use of an equally highly evolved descendant of S3.
The (short) history of computer industry shows that there is no way this is going to be true. There were punched cards and paper tapes. There were floppy disks. Sometimes you had to order 10s of them to be able to load stuff into your computer. These days the sum total of all bits there were in those punched cards and paper tapes and floppy disks would fit in a small portion of your SSD storage. And all of this has happened in less than a century!
Fast forward a few more centuries (decades?) where another technological breakthrough would make S3 redundant and irrelevant. In a 100 years, all of what you see in S3, all of Wikipedia, and all of the Internet may fit in a small device that you can carry in your pocket or on your wrist (or in your brain-chip or whatever is in fashion then). The way you interface and interact with the data would also be radically different.
The idea that highly-evolve descendants would care about or even be aware of S3 shows hubris, disregard for the history and lack of imagination!
It’s an age thing. I’m a little younger; I’m in the cohort that, exactly once in our career, names servers after Roman or Greek pantheons. I think that all of us have, at some point, administered a machine named hera. My younger peers are using chemical and molecule names, or Batman villains.
(on stuff existing forever) Did it ever work for anyone? — No…. But it might work for us!
The hubris
Unicode contains the letter 𓂺, an Egyptian hieroglyphic invented thousands of years ago. Unexpected things can endure for a long time.
I feel like you chose this particular example of a hieroglyphic letter for a specific reason but I can’t put my finger on it.
Shows up as a blank box to me, which I feel is meaningful in this context.
That’s because a lot of default OS fonts leave that symbol, and only that symbol, out. Shows up fine on Android though.
It’s shown for me in Chrome on macOS, but not in Chrome on Windows.
For those who can’t see it, it’s a penis, shown in the act of either micturition or ejaculation.
I can’t imagine a more appropriate single-character interpretation of human history.
That’s deflating.
Here I was, thinking that operating systems and for storage volume managers and (potentially distributed) file systems did that. ;)
Don’t get me wrong, the concept of object storage is nice, but that statement feels a bit silly. Distributing data and load, mechanisms for high availability, load balancing, HTTP APIs are all not things invented by the cloud and if you didn’t just run your hobby server it also was in use. What the cloud did and that I grant is maybe somewhat unintentionally and out of necessity and limitations standardize a lot of things. That’s really cool and I am very happy about that, but sometimes people almost make it sound like there was no proper server setup you could build before AWS came along. Just instead of paying your own people running it you outsource stuff and pay a third party and pay people to tell the third party what need, basically set up the specs for the contract via Terraform, etc. But I get get carried away.
S3 is not even in the top 5 oldest still-in-use distributed file system protocols: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustered_file_system#Distributed_file_systems
I’m not sure they meant the protocol, but the service. And I suppose at any large scale it’s the best example of “not-only-privately-accessible file storage (service)” we have
The (short) history of computer industry shows that there is no way this is going to be true. There were punched cards and paper tapes. There were floppy disks. Sometimes you had to order 10s of them to be able to load stuff into your computer. These days the sum total of all bits there were in those punched cards and paper tapes and floppy disks would fit in a small portion of your SSD storage. And all of this has happened in less than a century!
Fast forward a few more centuries (decades?) where another technological breakthrough would make S3 redundant and irrelevant. In a 100 years, all of what you see in S3, all of Wikipedia, and all of the Internet may fit in a small device that you can carry in your pocket or on your wrist (or in your brain-chip or whatever is in fashion then). The way you interface and interact with the data would also be radically different.
The idea that highly-evolve descendants would care about or even be aware of S3 shows hubris, disregard for the history and lack of imagination!
I now blame you for placing this idea in my head.
It’s an age thing. I’m a little younger; I’m in the cohort that, exactly once in our career, names servers after Roman or Greek pantheons. I think that all of us have, at some point, administered a machine named
hera. My younger peers are using chemical and molecule names, or Batman villains.The beauty is as corporate media expands, there are more and more sequels to name servers after. Rocky VII: Adrian’s Revenge!