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I think it is fair to say that S3 (as named files) is not a filesystem and it is inefficient to use it directly as such for common filesystem use cases; the same way that you could say it for a tarball[0].

This does not make S3 a bad storage, just a bad filesystem, not everything needs to be a filesystem.

Arguably is it good that S3 is not a filesystem, as it can be a leaky abstraction eg in git you cannot have two tags name "v2" and "v2/feature-1" as you cannot have both a file and a folder with the same name.

For something more closely related to URLs than filenames forcing a filesystem abstraction is a limitation as "/some/url", "/some/url/", and "/some/url/some-default-name-decided-by-the-webserver" can be different.[1]

[0] where a different tradeoff is that searching a file by name is slower but reading many small files can be faster.

[1] maybe they should be the same, but enforcing it is a bad idea



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