How I Stumbled Into This Rabbit Hole
A few days ago, saw on LinkedIn someone dropped a post - "S4 - Store Less Pay Less" and since then there have been some people (re-)posting their views on how awesome it is.
I clicked. I read. I raised an eyebrow.
Don't get me wrong — the engineering is impressive. Rust codebase, NVIDIA nvCOMP integration, intelligent codec dispatching, S3 wire compatibility, the whole nine yards. The README is polished, the benchmarks are thorough, and the alpha disclaimer is refreshingly honest. It's a genuinely cool piece of open-source work.
But here's the thing that kept nagging at me: we already solved this problem. And we solved it without adding a proxy layer, without managing GPU instances, without dealing with sidecar index files, and without the operational complexity of running yet another piece of infrastructure in the hot path of every S3 request.
