WebDAV has been around a lot longer and does many of the same things as object storage. It also has support for random access read/writes where object storage requires you to download, edit, and re-upload the whole file. Seems like a no-brainer if you wanted to offer cloud storage to customers.
I thought maybe supporting large uploads was the draw, but WebDAV can support chunking, so you don’t need to allocate extra server resources to accommodate large files.
I use both daily, and WebDAV just seems like it does everything better: object storage feels like throwing files in a junk drawer and WebDAV more like an organized filing cabinet.
Aside from Nextcloud and a few FOSS applications, the only big thing I recall that adopted WebDAV was Frontpage back in the day.
So, what am I missing? What makes object storage so compelling that it became ubiquitous while WebDAV is practically a legacy spec?
I don’t know much about the history, but I would guess that adoption was driven by the actual service that was provided, not how good the protocol was. AWS did their own thing instead of adopting WebDAV, who knows why. Then people started using S3 and building stuff on it since it was cheap. Now people build services that are S3 conformant so that the stuff built on S3 can be migrated to it.
This is all just an educated guess though.
When S3 was released, the huge draw was its pay-as-you-go model, not its new protocol. If amazon was using webdav instead of making their own protocol, I bet it’ll still got popular.
Yeah, that was kinda my point. Economics drove adoption, not technological brilliance or even ease-of-use.