Amazon S3, and its analogues in other clouds, have become the foundation of the modern cloud software architecture. Today, nearly every data-intensive system is being built around S3. However, the hardware assumptions baked into S3’s design – and into all the software architectures that have emerged around it – are rapidly becoming obsolete. S3’s dominance is due to its many advantages: effectively infinite capacity, high durability, and low per-gigabyte capacity cost. For large objects and para...