Validating claims of S3 compatibility is important. The S3 API has corner cases like and misfeatures like BitTorrent hosting but sometimes vendors omit key features like multi-part upload and v4 signatures. s3-tests[1] is the best way we have to evaluate implementations yet only Ceph and S3Proxy seem to contribute to it. Users should hold vendors' feet to the fire about these these claims.
Are you suggesting that Wasabi might go away because, maybe, this is not the "traditional" valley model?
Convertible notes were all the rage a few years back, too. It was all over the blogs and HN.
Perhaps in the "dev/ops" world, but S3 as a standalone repository could absolutely work for most enterprises and quite frankly soho users as a backup target. That being said, I have almost no faith this will survive and as such wouldn't trust it with my backups.
But S3 originally launched by itself, before EC2.
If Wasabi adds a Lambda-like serverless compute layer that could be powerful.
What if they deploy a silent corruption bug next year?
Is there such a white paper for AWS/Azure/GCP? Or are they running on reputation alone?
- Their performance claims are incredibly biased. Amazon S3 has far better write performance than their claims.
- They claim 100% S3 compatibility but it fails a large number of API calls using Ceph’s s3-test. I didn’t dig into this too far but they do claim “No need to change your S3-compatible application” so changing my endpoint + credentials should have worked. To their credit - PUT, GET and DELETE did work but that is only 3 of 100’s of API’s.
- Their durability claims are highly suspect. I would want to see a white paper breaking this down.
- Their first round was debt financing.
Why this business model does’t work...
Most people don’t use S3 alone. S3 is a source for other AWS services. That being said, Wasabi becomes a more expensive option as you have a 4 cent egress fee to access data from the rest of your AWS infrastructure. The only place Wasabi becomes cheaper is for those using S3 direct/alone which is a very small subset of S3 usage. AWS is very open about this in white papers, conferences, tech talks, etc.
Wasabi is an economy at scale play that cast way too far a net. There is opportunity in specific vertical markets to sell a solution (object paired with compute) but a pure S3 endpoint will never take substantial marketshare away from AWS.