I think we get a "S3 clone" about once every week or two on the Golang reddit.

It strikes me as a classic case of "we need all the interested people to pull in one project, not each start their own". AI may have made this worse then ever.

I'm pretty sure I set up most of what "Simple S3" using with Apache2 and WebDAV at least fifteen years ago.

Every month there's a post of "I just want a simple S3 server" and every single one of them has a different definition of "simple". The moment any project overlaps between the use cases of two "simple S3" projects, they're no longer "simple" enough.

That's probably why hosted S3-like services will exist even if writing "simple" S3 servers is so easy. Everyone has a different opinion of what basic S3 usage is like and only the large providers/startups with business licensing can afford to set up a system that supports all of them.

Or maybe the underlying philosophy is different enough to warrant its own implementation. For example, the Filestash implementation (which I made) listed in the article is stateless and acts as a gateway that proxies everything to an underlying storage. We don't own the storage, you do, via any of the available connectors (SFTP, FTP, WebDAV, Azure, SMB, IPFS, Sharepoint, Dropbox, ...). You generate S3 keys bound to a specific backend and path, and everything gets proxied through. That's fundamentally different to not fit in the mold of other alternatives that mostly assume they own your storage and as a result can not be made stateless by design. That approach has pro and cons on each side

> It strikes me as a classic case of "we need all the interested people to pull in one project, not each start their own".

And every few weeks in the cooking subreddit we get a new person talking about a new soup they made. Just think if we put all 1000 of those cooks in one kitchen with one pot, we'd end up with the best soup in the world.

Anyway, we already have "the one" project everyone can coalesce on, we have CephFS. If all the redditors actually hopped into one project, it would end up as an even more complex difficult to manage mess I believe.

I think it's like NES emulators. It's not that anyone needs one more. It's just that they're fun to make.

Diverse competition is the best way to identify a winning formula, which can then be perfected by a fewer number of players.

S3 with tree-shaking. i.e. specify the features you need, out comes an executable for that subset of S3 features you desire.

Or like lodash custom builds.

https://lodash.com/custom-builds