Mountpoint For Amazon S3 : Enhancing File System Integration For Effective Storage Management

Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is a simple, high-throughput file client for mounting an Amazon S3 bucket as a local file system.

With Mountpoint for Amazon S3, your applications can access objects stored in Amazon S3 through file operations like open and read.

Mountpoint for Amazon S3 automatically translates these operations into S3 object API calls, giving your applications access to the elastic storage and throughput of Amazon S3 through a file interface.

Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is optimized for applications that need high read throughput to large objects, potentially from many clients at once, and to write new objects sequentially from a single client at a time.

This means it’s a great fit for applications that use a file interface to:

• read large objects from S3, potentially from many instances concurrently, without downloading them to local storage first
• access only some S3 objects out of a larger data set, but can’t predict which objects in advance
• upload their output to S3 directly, or upload files from local storage with tools like cp

but probably not the right fit for applications that:

• use file operations that S3 doesn’t natively support, like directory renaming or symlinks
• make edits to existing files (don’t work on your Git repository or run vim in Mountpoint )

Mountpoint for Amazon S3 does not implement all the features of a POSIX file system, and there are some differences that may affect compatibility with your application.

See Mountpoint file system behavior for a detailed description of Mountpoint for Amazon S3’s behavior and POSIX support and how they could affect your application.

To troubleshoot file operations that may not be supported by Mountpoint, see the troubleshooting documentation.

Current Status

Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is generally available! We’re tracking future feature development on the Mountpoint for Amazon S3 public roadmap.

We’re always interested in feedback on features, performance, and compatibility. Please send feedback by opening a new GitHub issue or adding your input to an existing roadmap issue.

Getting Started

Run these two commands to install Mountpoint for Amazon S3 on your Amazon Linux EC2 instance (for Graviton instances, replace x86_64 with arm64 in the URL):

wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/mountpoint-s3-release/latest/x86_64/mount-s3.rpm
sudo yum install -y ./mount-s3.rpm

On Ubuntu, use these commands instead (for Graviton instances, replace x86_64 with arm64 in the URL):

wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/mountpoint-s3-release/latest/x86_64/mount-s3.deb
sudo apt-get install -y ./mount-s3.deb

For more information click here.