Amazon S3 Doesn't Hope Hardware Won't Fail. It Assumes It Already Has.

Most engineers build distributed systems hoping nothing breaks.

Amazon S3 was engineered under the opposite assumption: that something is already broken, right now, and the system needs to be fine with that.

That one mindset shift explains almost everything about how S3 works — and why it's one of the most reliable pieces of infrastructure on the planet.

I went through a deep-dive conversation with Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, VP of Data and Analytics at AWS, and extracted the engineering philosophy underneath the product. Not the marketing version. The real one.

Here's what actually matters.