can't reliably delete and re-create buckets with same name is a known issue and AWS design decision

[aculich]

After deleting a bucket and attempting to re-create it with the same name I received the following error code and description:

Error Code	Description	HTTP Status Code	SOAP Fault Code Prefix
OperationAborted	A conflicting conditional operation is currently in progress against this resource. Try again.	409 Conflict	Client

The delete_bucket behavior is surprising relative to other delete operations and is undocumented in the AWS S3 API.

Creating a bucket with the same name as one that has been deleted may not even be possible in some cases. Typically it takes a few hours for the bucket names to be cleared so in practice it is often possible to create a new bucket with the same name.

Interestingly, create_bucket also does not behave as expected compated to other create/delete operations in the AWS API; if a bucket already exists, the call to create_bucket does not raise an exception about a duplicate already existing, which it does for other resource types other than buckets.

The behavior is not mentioned in any of the official documentation, but it seems that other people learn the hard way just as I did, even though this has been a known issue since at least 2009 with this official reply from Amazon:

I strongly recommend against deleting a bucket that you want to keep. There’s never any guarantee that you will be able to create a <new bucket with the same bucket name.

Read more at:

• http://psykidellic.github.io/posts/amazon-s3---careful-with-bucket-names/
• https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=37532
• http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/SOAPDeleteBucket.html
• http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/ErrorResponses.html#ErrorCodeList