I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's significant simplification of working with Amazon S3 at scale:
Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced significantly increased S3 request rate performance and the ability to parallelize requests to scale to the desired throughput. Notably this performance increase also "removes any previous guidance to randomize object prefixes" and enables the use of "logical or sequential naming patterns in S3 object naming without any performance implications".
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Continue reading the full post in Amazon S3 Increases Request Rate Performance and Drops Randomized Prefix Requirement.