Well, when you are small and your competitor is large it is useful to tap into what has made them successful and use it to your advantage. When Amazon Web Services (AWS) created their Simple Storage Service (S3) for storing data objects in a scale-out storage server architecture, they became very successful. Their Application Programming Interface or API became a de facto industry standard for storing data in the cloud. By learning how to implement the S3 API, hundreds of third-parties were able to develop software and hardware that works with AWS S3. By extension, if you could implement a storage service that was compatible with AWS S3, then the same third-parties whose software and hardware works with AWS S3 would also work with your AWS S3-compatible storage service.
When you hear that something is compatible with something else, it doesn't necessarily mean that the two are compatible in every way. And so it is with the AWS S3 API. A number of object based storage providers claim AWS S3-compatibility, but it might not extend beyond a basic or moderate level of functionality. Some providers of object based storage software are more S3 compatible than others.
In choosing a suitable object based storage software vendor to partner with, MonadCloud chose Cloudian because it was committed to full AWS S3-compatibility. By selecting Cloudian, MonadCloud's customers will be able to choose from hundreds of hardware and software data management solutions that work with AWS S3.
Is AWS S3 the only cloud data storage standard out there? No, but it is the most widely supported in the market by third parties and customers. MonadCloud expects emergent standards, like SNIA's Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), to be adopted and implemented by more object based storage software providers over the next few years. But for the foreseeable future, AWS S3 will continue to dominate the public cloud storage market. Everyone loves standards in information technology, which is probably why we have so many of them.
