AWS introduces an open source mountpoint for Amazon S3, with an aim to assist data management with simplicity, flexibility, and control.
AWS unveiled Mountpoint for Amazon S3 on the most recent Pi Day, an open source file client that will provide high throughput access to Amazon S3. The local mount point, which is currently in alpha, offers fast single-instance transfer rates and is especially designed for use with data lake applications.
Amazon S3 Mountpoint converts local file system API requests to S3 object API requests like GET and LIST. The client supports listing files and directories as well as random and sequential read operations on files. Writes (PUTs) are not supported in the alpha version, and in the future, the client is only anticipated to enable sequential writes to new objects.
The S3 APIs do not support POSIX file system functions, and the open source client does not imitate activities like directory renaming, which would necessitate numerous S3 API calls. Mountpoint for S3 is not the first client to offer S3 as a filesystem; popular open source methods to mount a bucket using FUSE include Goofys and s3fs.
Mountpoint, which is distributed under the Apache License 2.0, is not yet ready for use with production workloads. On GitHub, you can find the initial alpha release and the public roadmap.
