Infrastructure for Agentic S3-Like Storage
S3 became the default storage layer because it was designed around the constraints of spinning disk. SSD prices have dropped to roughly 3x disk, and that gap is closing. The curren...
S3 became the default storage layer because it was designed around the constraints of spinning disk. SSD prices have dropped to roughly 3x disk, and that gap is closing. The current S3 architecture optimizes for things that no longer matter as much, like minimizing random seeks. A new storage primitive that treats SSD as the baseline, rather than as a cache for disk, would allow much lower latency for the random reads that agents need when looking up context.
Developers are already building workarounds: DuckDB over S3, local SSD caches in front of object stores, hybrid architectures that add complexity and operational cost. Cloud providers have no incentive to disrupt their own margins on storage. That creates a gap for a developer-focused, high-performance object store with an S3-compatible API.
Start by building a single-node SSD-native object store with an S3 API. Target the developers who complain about S3 latency for agentic retrieval workloads. Grow from there to a distributed version.