Why One Developer Built a File Transfer App on WebRTC Instead of Amazon S3
A developer building ButterShare, a large-file transfer product, chose peer-to-peer (P2P) technology over Amazon S3 after concluding the two solve fundamentally different problems. S3 excels at storing files for asynchronous access, but ButterShare's goal was simply moving bytes directly from one device to another in real time. Using WebRTC, the app routes data straight from sender to recipient, eliminating the need for a cloud intermediary to store and re-serve the file. For a 100GB transfer, the S3 model effectively moves data twice — upload then download — while P2P handles it in a single pass when both parties are online. The developer stressed that S3 remains an excellent tool for storage-centric use cases, but the architectural choice for ButterShare was driven by the product's specific real-time transfer requirement.
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