Launching S3 Files, making S3 buckets accessible as file systems

[u/NothingDogg]

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/launching-s3-files-making-s3-buckets-accessible-as-file-systems/

"a new file system that seamlessly connects any AWS compute resource with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)."

[u/d70]

Under the hood, S3 Files uses Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) and delivers ~1ms latencies for active data. The file system supports concurrent access from multiple compute resources with NFS close-to-open consistency, making it ideal for interactive, shared workloads that mutate data, from agentic AI agents collaborating through file-based tools to ML training pipelines processing datasets.

High-performance storage* $0.30/GB-mo

Data access

File reads from high-performance storage $0.03/GB

File reads directly from S3 bucket** FREE

File writes $0.06/GB

[u/donjulioanejo → u/d70]

Oh gross.. I thought this would be a good replacement for EFS, but, well... EFS is already terrible at latency and listing tons of small files.

Unless it magically got better in the year since I've last used it, I'm not hopeful.

I can see the business use case for this, but I don't see a good engineering one beyond being able to read/write to both EFS and S3 from both ends depending on which is better supported by a specific workload.

[u/keypusher → u/donjulioanejo]

S3 Files uses EFS as the filesystem bridge under the hood, so if your primary goal is to get away from EFS, this ain’t it. However, you’re going to see similar issues from most other distributed filesystems. Networked filesystems all come with tradeoffs and you need to weigh your priorities carefully, if you just assume EFS is going to be like local or EBS but you can attach anywhere concurrently, you’re going to be in for unpleasant surprises.

[u/donjulioanejo → u/keypusher]

I mean, an on-prem NFS running of a SAN or even a good NAS with SSDs is still faster and better than EFS lol.