One of the more interesting stories to come out of the Web 2.0 Expo is that of Amazon.com’s Simple Storage Service (S3) passing 5 billion stored objects. You can watch a video of Jeff Bezos talking to conference attendees here. According to Bezos, S3 was storing just 800,000 objects in July 2006. That’s some pretty incredible growth, and I expect it will only continue.
More and more I am convinced that web services like S3 will become the norm. Companies like Amazon.com, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and eBay are all very good at building and maintaining the infrastructure their services require to operate smoothly and efficiently. It only makes sense to further monetize that competency.
S3 has had an incredibly positive impact on Podcast Spot, and I know we’d be able to make use of additional web services if only they existed.
Read: TechCrunch
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I’d be more interested if there was ‘sub-account users’ on a large scale.
Say I have a consumer application that talks to my service and I want each of MY users to be able to store files on my service (but so that only they can access them). If I want to use S3 (the last time I checked), while I can get my client app to use S3 directly, every user would need to have my account credentials (or I’d have to pay for and manager their S3 accounts), or they’d need their own account, or the files have to come through my servers, so that the credentials were protected.
Interesting idea. But why not just have the user authenticate to your service, and then you store the data in your own S3 account, maybe in a subfolder for the user?
That was my 3rd option, but then I’d be paying for the data transfer and needing bandwidth that is in plentiful supply directly with Amazon.
They could work in WS-* federated security as an alternative
I quite like SOAP and WS-* myself, but I get the impression that Amazon is leaning towards REST-type services.
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