Amazon S3 is the oldest service in the catalogue of Amazon Web Services (AWS). We sat down with Andy Warfield, Distinguished Engineer at AWS, to talk about the 19-year journey of Amazon S3 from simple backup solution to sophisticated data foundation.
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Warfield talks about how S3 began as essentially “a storage locker across town” for archival purposes, before customers discovered its REST architecture made it capable of handling massive parallel workloads. This unexpected advantage fueled S3’s growth beyond unstructured data into analytics and AI domains. The introduction of columnar formats like Parquet and open table formats like Iceberg transformed what was possible, culminating in AWS’s recent launch of S3 Tables.
Besides the general direction Amazon S3 has taken and takes, we also talk about other challenges related to current developments. One of them is how AWS and Amazon S3 handles the bloat that is associated with vectorizing databases for use in AI use cases. This challenge is driving significant innovation at AWS to optimize storage for the AI era.
All in all, Amazon S3 has had to evolve continuously to mirror the broader developments in how businesses approach data – from static archives to dynamic, queryable assets powering real-time decision making.
The final topic we talk about is the future of Amazon S3. Warfield wants it to be “pulled closer to application code” with improved performance and more flexible access methods to ensure customers don’t have to choose upfront how they’ll use their data.
We are slightly biased of course, but we think this is a very good episode of Techzine Talks, and highly recommend anyone interested in the topic to listen to it. Tune in now!
Techzine Talks on Tour: season two
We started Techzine Talks on Tour in May of 2024, with the goal of doing at least one episode every two weeks. After 25 episodes in 2024 we were close enough to that target for us to call the first season a good start. That’s what it is, a start, because we’re not done yet. We continue with a second season, with the goal of growing our reach even further.
A big thank you to the people who found us in 2024 already. We hope you continue to listen to Techzine Talks on Tour in 2025. If this is your first encounter with our podcast, there’s much more to come! We hope you enjoy this episode.
Where to find Techzine Talks on Tour?
Techzine Talks on Tour is available on all the well-known platforms. So you can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube for example. Just search for Techzine Talks on Tour in your favorite podcast app.
Previous episodes of Techzine Talks on Tour:
- A Ferrari needs brakes, innovation needs cybersecurity
- Behind Cisco’s billion-dollar AI investment strategy
- Agentic AI is about much more than “sprinkling LLM fairy dust”
- The Atlassian platform is a Lego box of collaboration tools
- How to balance cybersecurity and innovation at an acceptable risk?
Get in touch
We hope you like this new podcast series. If so, please let us know. If you have suggestions on how we can improve, we would like to hear those too. We’re also open to suggestions around specific topics, or specific people that want to appear in an episode of Techzine Talks on Tour. You can find both Coen van Eenbergen and Sander Almekinders on LinkedIn, or you can send an email to info@techzine.eu.