Amazon S3 - S3 API and Competing Services

S3 API and Competing Services

The broad adoption of Amazon S3 and related tooling, has given rise to competing services based on the S3 API. These services utilize the standard programing interface; however, they are differentiated by their underlying technologies and supporting business models. A cloud storage standard (like electrical and networking standards) enable competing service providers to design their services and clients using different piece parts in different ways yet still communicate and provide the following benefits :

1. Increase competition by providing a set of rules and a level playing field, encouraging market entry by smaller companies which might otherwise be precluded.
2. Encourage innovation by Cloud Storage Vendors, Developers, and Client Tool Vendors, because they can focus on improving their own products and services instead of focusing on compatibility.
3. Allow economies of scale in implementation (i.e., if a service provider encounters an outage or as clients outgrow their tools and need faster operating systems or tools, they can easily swap out solutions).
4. Provide timely solutions for delivering functionality in response to demands of the marketplace (i.e, As business growth in new locations increases demand, clients can easily change or add service providers simply by subscribing to the new service).

Adopting a new technology is challenging. Knowing that there are competing services in the marketplace built on the standard (or subsets of the standard) makes adopting client applications easier. You get to choose your own service vendor based on location, speed, pricing, and service level agreements as well as choosing from a multitude of client tools and developer tools that work with the API.

Examples of competing S3 compliant storage implementations include:

• Cloud.com’s CloudStack
• Cloudian, an S3-compatible object storage software package.
• Connectria Cloud Storage in 2011 became the first US cloud storage service provider based on the Scality RING organic storage technology
• Eucalyptus Walrus Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_(computing)
• Nimbula
• Riak CS, which implements a subset of the S3 API including REST and ACLs on objects and buckets.