[TheColorYellow]

Because at this point it's a well known API. I bet people want to recreate AWS without the Amazon part, and so this is for them.

Which, to your point, makes no sense because as you rightly point out, people use S3 because of the Amazon services and ecosystem it is integrated with - not at all because it is "good tech"

[acdha]

S3 was the second AWS service, behind SQS, and saw rapid adoption which cannot be explained by integration with services introduced later.

[vlovich123]

Storage is generally sticky but I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss that reason because it might explain why anything would fail to displace it; a bunch of software is written against S3 and the entire ecosystem around it is quite rich. It doesn’t explain the initial popularity but does explain stickiness. Initial popularity was because it was the first good REST API to do cloud storage AND the price was super reasonable.

[otabdeveloper4]

S3 is just HTTP. There isn't really an ecosystem for S3, unless you just mean all the existing http clients.