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S3 Managed Tables, Unmanaged Costs: The 20x Surprise with AWS S3 Tables

Blog post from Onehouse

Post Details
Company
Date Published
Author
Vinish Reddy Pannala and Kyle Weller
Word Count
2,232
Company Posts That Month
2
Language
English
Hacker News Points
-
Post removed?
No
Summary

AWS S3 Tables aims to simplify table maintenance for Apache Iceberg by offering a fully managed service with built-in support for storing tabular data at scale, leveraging a "table bucket" abstraction on Amazon S3. However, hands-on testing reveals significant drawbacks, such as long delays in compaction, limited observability, and costs up to 20-30 times higher than alternatives like AWS EMR. The default compaction settings result in performance degradation, especially for workloads requiring frequent updates. S3 Tables' limited control over compaction parameters further compounds these issues, making it less suitable for data-intensive workloads at scale. Despite being a significant milestone for the lakehouse ecosystem, S3 Tables may not be ready for high-performance needs, while Onehouse offers a more cost-effective and flexible alternative with advanced compaction techniques and comprehensive monitoring capabilities.

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