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conditional-write · shipping · also Conditional object write

Conditional write

A conditional write changes a resource only when a server-evaluated precondition, such as a matching entity tag or the absence of a current object, holds.

For Amazon S3 general-purpose buckets, If-Match on PutObject or CompleteMultipartUpload compares the current destination object's ETag, while If-None-Match: * requires no current object. This is an object-level precondition, not a multi-object transaction or a test that no intervening write ever happened. Client-side checking followed by an unconditional upload does not provide the same protection. An ETag condition validates the representation under the service's ETag rules, not every metadata field or application invariant.

Relations

related
object-storage, entity-tag, multipart-upload, compare-and-swap

Advantages

Limitations

Citations

  1. RFC 9110: HTTP Semantics, conditional requests (accessed 2026-10-12)
  2. Amazon S3: How to prevent object overwrites with conditional writes (accessed 2026-10-12)
  3. Amazon S3 API Reference: PutObject (accessed 2026-10-12)
  4. Amazon S3 API Reference: CompleteMultipartUpload (accessed 2026-10-12)
  5. Amazon S3: Data consistency model (accessed 2026-10-12)
  6. Object ETags: checksums and conditional writes are different (accessed 2026-10-12)

JSON: /data/terms/conditional-write.json