S3
Amazon S3 API
Judgement: Adopt
The object-storage API everyone implements.
AWS's object storage API has become the lingua franca of the data lake. Every cloud, every storage vendor, every minio-style appliance speaks some flavour of it.
Strictly speaking it is not an open standard — AWS controls it — but the practical reality is that "talks S3" is treated as a portability guarantee.
Why it counts as a standard
AWS publishes the S3 REST API, and MinIO, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, Ceph RGW, GCS interop, and most on-prem object stores re-implement it. "Speaks S3" is treated as a portability guarantee precisely because the API surface — not AWS's server — is what tools depend on.
At a glance
- Category
- Storage Systems
- Governance
- AWS (vendor-controlled, but de-facto standard)
- Status
- De-facto standard; implemented by everyone
- First released
- 2006
Links
Related standards
Other standards in Storage Systems.
- HDFS — Hadoop Distributed File System
See S3 in context
Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare S3 against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.