But that's not what malloc is? Malloc gives you a pointer to a fixed length block of memory that you can use to store data. S3 associates data provided by you to an arbitrary key. That's totally different, functionality wise. The only way they're related is that they store stuff.
'malloc' gives you a pointer to a fixed length block of memory that you can use to store data. 'ls' lists files in a directory. That's totally different, functionality wise.
'malloc' gives you a pointer to a fixed length block of memory that you can use to store data. A table saw cuts pieces of wood. That's totally different, functionality wise.
'malloc' gives you a pointer to a fixed length block of memory that you can use to store data. S3 gives you a url to a variable length block of durable storage that you can use to store data. That's... more similar to each other than the words "totally different" would suggest.
>S3 gives you a url to a variable length block of durable storage that you can use to store data.
nitpick: it doesn't. you control the url, because it's based on the key that you provide. malloc gives you an arbitrary pointer. it's closer to mmap (where you control the address), but even that's different because the address you provide is merely a hint.
That's viewing it from an engineering point of view. Bezos was viewing it from a business point of view. He wanted a way to allocate memory on the internet, the details are for the engineers to figure out.
Actually, "echo" started off as a semi-holodeck. It was supposed to be kindle/tv/radio/everything replacement, for your living room.
Bezos wanted "kindle, without the hardware". Like, read off of your outstretched hand, or a piece of paper, or the wall.
Interact with hand gestures and voice controls, and it could track your location in a room through sound using a microphone array and loads of math. (my contribution)
But it turned out that despite getting it to "kinda" work, the 20KW power requirement for the huge computers, motors, and projector, and low resolution made it seem like >20 years out from a real product, not ~3 years out.
At the time, I jokingly proposed scrapping everything but the audio subsystem, and cram it into a tiny box, but then quickly added that such a product would be doomed to fail. You can't fit the necessary compute in a tiny box, so for it to work it'd have to transmit the audio to the cloud for processing.
No one in their right mind would willingly buy a small device for the home with a microphone array always listening, tracking their location, always processing and transmitting data to the amazon server farm, consumers aren't that stupid, right?
I still get pissy whenever I see one of those things.
Or computer science grad who worked at a quant hedge fund and who probably wouldn't have been hired if he couldn't program, who went on to found an intensely computer-focused behemoth.
I actually thought this was what the article was going to be. Someone could probably hack up a malloc implementation quickly that mounts shm files over nfs.
> Jeff Bezos’ original spec for S3 was very succinct – he wanted malloc (a key memory allocation function for C programs) for the Internet.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3-path-deprecation-...