Did you know that AWS S3 is almost 20 years old? The “cloud” as a concept is fairly recent but in the time-distortion that has occurred since the rise of the internet, I think many of us have lost track of how old some of these public cloud providers are, and as a side-effect, how old their technology offerings can become. Periodically you need to clean out the attic, and this week AWS did just that with their “AWS Service Availability Updates.”
In the list of services that probably have fewer users than most YC startups, was one which I had recently found incredibly useful: S3 Object Lambda.
From Corey of Last Week in AWS infamy:
S3 Object Lambdas have always been a bit weird. You can still have Lambdas operate on S3, and at least actual Lambdas are likely to see service improvements; Object Lambdas have been moribund for years.
Object Lambda is admittedly a niche product. But what makes it quite interesting for my purposes is it allows you to modify S3 requests en route. It is by far the fastest way to add custom business logic around data stored in S3 while preserving S3’s API and semantics.
For example, you can create a completely fabricated key space with S3 Object Lambda that represents a logical object layout, even if your physical object layout, the actual bytes stored in S3, does not match.
As handy as I think S3 Object Lambda is, when I spoke with some folks responsible for S3 Object Lambda at AWS earlier this year, it became clear that there was no further investment in the feature. To me the writing was on the wall that AWS was going to kill the feature eventually, so I proactively shifted any work where it was present.
S3 Object Lambda now joins the graveyard next to S3 Select and closes the book on “what if S3 were a data application platform.” Instead AWS continues to push vectors, vectors, VECTORS! Pivoting towards “what if S3 were an AI platform?”.