Mountpoint-S3 Alternatives: POSIX-Compatible, High-Performance S3 for Linux and Serverless in AWS
Mountpoint for Amazon S3 connects AWS S3 buckets to Linux filesystems. While intended to bridge the gap between object storage and filesystems (and Kubernetes using a CSI driver), it has several downsides that cause problems for developers: it has limited POSIX compatibility, limited directory handling and file editing, and inconsistent file writing behavior. This article summarizes the alternatives to Mountpoint, including open-source solutions with better POSIX compatibility, and cunoFS, which provides the best possible POSIX compatibility and outperforms Mountpoint by up to 7x in Linux and serverless environments. Mountpoint for Amazon S3 compatibility: it’s not very good When choosing the storage component that you will use as the foundation for your HPC, ML, media, and other high-throughput workflows, you will want to address three main concerns: compatibility, performance, and reliability. Unfortunately, Mountpoint for Amazon S3 fails 2/3 of these requirements: Poor compatibility: Mountpoint does not support all POSIX operations (it’s actually incredibly limited), as shown in our FFmpeg benchmarks where it was unable to even complete common FFmpeg tasks. Adequate performance: Mountpoint performs similarly to other FUSE-based file system adapters and is usable for some production scenarios, but it’s far from the best. Poor reliability: Lack of support for common POSIX operations, as well as