Issue with S3 API and creating buckets that already exist (and owned by you)

["marios@redhat.com" <ma...@redhat.com>]

Hi,

Michal reported an issue with the aws s3 (ec2) in teambox 
https://teambox.com/projects/deltacloud:

"
I recently found that when you create a new bucket in EC2 and you use 
name which is already taken by another bucket it will always return 
'true' instead of throwing an exception. Seems like it's an another bug 
in aws gem, because when I checked create_bucket in EC2 driver I got 
true in every case.
As a workaround we could check if bucket exists and if so, we can throw 
our BackendError.
"

I've spent the best part of today trying to debug this; in the end the 
problem is neither our code nor the aws gem. The issue is with the S3 
API. See https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=88947&#88947

Scenarios:
=1=
*Create a bucket that already exists, but you do not own:

===> you get an error from S3 (BucketAlreadyExists) since bucket names 
are used as FQDNs (e.g. bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com)

=2=
*Create a bucket that already exists, that you do own AND you set a 
location other than the default eu-east-1 (by including a 
CreateBucketConfiguration and LocationConstraint elements in your 
request body)

====> you get an error from S3 (BucketAlreadyOwnedByYou).

=3=
*Create a bucket that already exists, that you do own but don't specify 
a location (so it gets put into eu-east-1)

====> no error, the bucket gets 're-created' which basically means its 
'creation time' gets updated (but otherwise nothing else, your blobs 
remain intact). THIS IS THE SCENARIO Michal was facing.

===============================

Since this is an issue with the provider API theres not much we can do. 
There's no 'bucket_exists' call; the only solution i can see is to get a 
list of all bucket names and check these for the bucket you are about to 
create, but I don't know if thats acceptable?

marios