The S3 API has quickly become the standard for object storage, but there are alternative APIs from major cloud providers. Many third-party solutions are now compatible with more than just S3, offering additional options to users. API compatibility could remain an issue, though—even if the customer has control of the entire stack, making changes to the application is not always economically or technically feasible.

To simplify data access and the migration process, some service providers offer a compatibility mode that allows customers to use the S3 API, or a subset of it, along with their native API. Thus, Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) should always be considered when evaluating the compatibility requirements of most applications that use an S3 interface.

Object storage is an excellent choice for many use cases and applications, both in the cloud and on-premises. Most applications that deal with unstructured data can easily take advantage of an object store, which contributes to its appeal. It’s a popular data storage target for containerized or serverless applications, as well as for more traditional object store use cases like backup, archiving, media content management, big data lakes, and high-performance computing (HPC).

However, Kubernetes’s rising popularity means that customers are mindful of portability and cloud lock-in, as containers are portable across public clouds and other environments. With so many container-based applications leveraging object storage, avoiding lock-in of object storage is as relevant as ever, and customers are evaluating alternatives and more open cloud ecosystems for storage and compute.

Amazon S3 is relatively inexpensive compared to other storage options available from Amazon AWS, but its performance is not always consistent. Moreover, the real cost of the service is not always immediately apparent and could become an issue for some customers. The S3 pricing model is quite complex and depends on factors like resilience, data locality, storage tiers, input/output (I/O) characteristics, and data transfer (egress) costs.

At the end of the day, it’s not easy to estimate the cost of S3 to your organization, and it can be difficult to predict how it will evolve. The egress costs of public cloud services worry CFOs and project managers the most, limiting flexibility for executing a multicloud strategy due to unforeseen costs.

All of which is to say that although AWS has a very compelling solution ecosystem, it’s smart to take a look at alternative solution providers, many of whom offer innovative services for vertical markets and use cases, with interesting non-AWS options. Thanks to the success of Amazon S3, many competitors have begun providing similar services while trying to differentiate in the market on price, performance, and functionality.

This is our fourth year evaluating alternatives to Amazon S3 in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 12 of the top alternatives to Amazon S3 and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

The post GigaOm Radar for Alternatives to Amazon S3 appeared first on Gigaom.

Organizations today look to the cloud for their compute and data storage needs. AWS is by far the current market leader in both revenue and number of customers, and its service ecosystem is the most complete. Amazon S3 is an object store, meaning that data is stored as objects along with associated metadata and identifiers. This architecture is inexpensive and scalable while rendering massive amounts of unstructured data more readily accessible and easily analyzed.

Kubernetes and container-based applications are increasingly popular, and S3 is a popular object storage solution for these applications. However, customers are mindful of portability and cloud lock-in. As a result, many organizations are evaluating alternative offerings for cloud-based compute and object storage to optimize features, availability, and costs.

For this report, we’re looking at object storage services (not products) with S3 compatibility.

Business Imperative
Object storage—S3-compatible storage services in particular—is a mature, well-rounded subset of cloud computing. It is foundational to a wide range of use cases relevant to organizations that are moving operations to the cloud, re-architecting applications to be more cloud-native, and scaling data storage to use cases, including media and backup.

Cloud-based object storage has become fairly ubiquitous to organizational storage needs, particularly in developer and DevOps use cases where “dropping data in an S3 bucket” is a commonly heard suggestion.

With many service providers offering a solution in this space, an S3 bucket isn’t the only correct solution; there is plenty of differentiation in the market for different use cases, feature sets, and nonfunctional considerations. The cost of changing between providers is minimal due to S3-compatible offerings across the field as well as the maturity of migration and data management tools.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of an alternative to Amazon S3 for the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the object storage service sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score for alternatives to Amazon S3 of 4.2 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that object storage services are a credible candidate for deployment and worth thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for alternatives to Amazon S3 are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.