> Honestly, I'd expect the exact opposite. Filesystems are really good at storing files. Why not leverage all that work?
File systems are optimized for a hierarchical organization on a single machine. However, this kind of organization inhibits storing data in a distributed system because of the links between entries. S3 and similar object stores are a distributed, flat “filesystem”. There’s no relationship between files and there’s no grouping (aside from a virtual one you can simulate but doesn’t really exist). That’s why S3 doesn’t suffer weird directory traversal attacks that bring your file system to a crawl because such potentially expensive operations don’t exist.
File systems are optimized for a hierarchical organization on a single machine. However, this kind of organization inhibits storing data in a distributed system because of the links between entries. S3 and similar object stores are a distributed, flat “filesystem”. There’s no relationship between files and there’s no grouping (aside from a virtual one you can simulate but doesn’t really exist). That’s why S3 doesn’t suffer weird directory traversal attacks that bring your file system to a crawl because such potentially expensive operations don’t exist.