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20 years of Amazon S3: A storage professional’s journey to AWS Hero

Storage Blog



This article chronicles a storage professional's 20-year journey with Amazon S3, from initial skepticism to AWS Hero status.

  • Author initially dismissed S3 in 2010 due to cost and learning curve versus tape backup
  • Reconsidered cloud storage in 2016 when pricing became competitive and features matured
  • S3 File Gateway SMB support eliminated NFS brittleness and reduced database server downtime
  • S3 Intelligent-Tiering automated cost optimization without manual lifecycle policy configuration
  • Strong consistency transition eliminated eventual consistency workarounds for applications
  • S3 now powers data lakes, LLM training, and vector store infrastructure

The article celebrates S3's evolution from simple storage to foundational cloud infrastructure, highlighting key innovations that transformed enterprise data management practices.



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