Many thanks to you for an excellent library! [Readers: James is the author of the Jets3t library.]

Renaming a bucket would indeed be the simplest solution, but as we know it’s not supported. There are hints in the S3 documentation that buckets are not treated the same as objects. For example, this quote from here:

The high availability engineering of Amazon S3 is focused on get, put, list, and delete operations. Because bucket operations work against a centralized, global resource space, it is not appropriate to make bucket create or delete calls on the high availability code path of your application. It is better to create or delete buckets in a separate initialization or setup routine that you run less often.

This means that the implementations of buckets and objects are not coupled – and therefore it makes sense that renaming the bucket would need to “cascade” to all object keys individually.

It’s unfortunate that S3 does not provide a way to simply rename a bucket. As it is, the seemingly trivial matter of a rogue capital letter led to this herculean undertaking.

It goes to show that you cannot think of S3 as a standard file system, and that you need to be careful to make the right decisions up-front if you can.