I'll never forget getting told off by the S3 PM at Reinvent because I had the nerve to ask for global sort in the S3 file browser. "Do it yourself!" he said... like, I need to find one file, sorted by date, about once every other month. You want me to learn the CLI and write a custom script for THAT?! Un-effing-believable
They have a bajillion highly-paid programmers (and enough infra to power God himself) and yet one basic feature present pretty much elsewhere in both the online and offline worlds is too much to ask
S3 is one of the last things I would manage from any GUI. I don’t use GUIs when I’m searching or listing local files either.
Besides the S3 cli commands are some of the most intuitive.
S3 is not a file system though and is a big blob of objects with tags. I think the worse thing AWS ever did was present S3 as a file system in the web console.
How would that even work on the API level efficiency given how S3 is architected? It’s clear given their optimization techniques they tell you to use that S3 is optimized for prefix style searching. That’s all they offer from the web console, the cli or the SDKs.
It would amount to retrieving everything from the S3 conceptual “index database” and doing a non optimized sort when everything is architected to search based on the key and a key prefix.
It’s far more efficient to let the client get a subset by prefix (ie “folder”) and sort/filter by other meta data client side.
As in, search results reflect only the current visible page and not all pages. If you use a bucket as a dump for, say, daily backups, finding a specific file from 3 years ago is really time-consuming and needlessly difficult. Can't sort, can't search.... just pure frustration
I haven't checked this feature in years -- maybe they fixed it
It comes from a fundamental lack of understanding of what S3 is and how it is organized. Objects are indexed as a key value store optimized for sorting on a key and a key prefix. The fact that keys can have backslashes as a character doesn’t mean that objects are stored in “folders”. Knowing how S3 indexes data - by key only and all other metadata is tagged on the object and not in the index, should inform how to name your keys and your access patterns.
For instance sorting by date, would involve AWS querying each objects meta data and then sorting it.
If having to find objects by date is an important use case, why not create keys in the format of YYYYMMDD?
And honestly (not directed at you) that’s a problem endemic with “AWS consultants”. Too many of them are old school netops people who took one certification learned how to click around in the console and now call themselves “AWS Architects”.
They end up duplicating their on prem architecture and processes - costing companies more and not knowing how to automate and increase efficiency.
As far as “powerful GUIs”, one of the earliest game changers for the Mac that helped Apple survive during the dark ages were all of the custom workflows that publishers had created using AppleScript. It wasn’t the better GUI back in the day.
The AWS web UI is a trainwreck by design. Amazon doesn't want to spend a penny more on it than the bare minimum, and the APIs and CLI tools (which are the intended entry points for all serious customers) do the job exceedingly well.
