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> Torrent support in S3 is being killed off with little notice.

Did anyone ever seriously use it? It never made much sense to me -- if you're trying to optimize for performance, S3 is already pretty good and a CDN can make that even better; if you're trying to optimize for cost, you wouldn't be using S3 in the first place.




At Airbnb, we considered using it for downloading deployment artifacts like app tarballs and search indexes within our cluster, back when we did deploys to stateful instances. The complexity was never worth it, though, and in the end we moved to Kubernetes anyways.


If you have a paid service that requires guaranteed delivery but want to offset a portion of the cost, it made sense. The problem is that BitTorrent is not trivial to integrate into non-torrent applications.


I never used it, seriously or otherwise, but I appreciated having it there:

1) Universal torrent support is prerequisite to broad adoption. Having S3 be part of that network is nice.

2) It gives a fallback to exploding costs if something I do goes viral. I have the option of a weekend hackathon.

... and so on.

It's one of those features I like even if I don't use.

(And no, that's not actually common of features -- most of AWS, I wouldn't mind if it was not there)




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