Mount Object Storage Locally using S3 Fuse
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On most cloud providers, object storage is cheaper than paying for the equivalent size in block storage. Using FUSE, we can mount S3 compatible object storage with the command s3fs
. Do note, that there are a few downsides with mounting object storage as documented on their README:
- random writes or appends to files require rewriting the entire object, optimized with multi-part upload copy
- metadata operations such as listing directories have poor performance due to network latency
- non-AWS providers may have eventual consistency so reads can temporarily yield stale data (AWS offers read-after-write consistency since Dec 2020)
- no atomic renames of files or directories
- no coordination between multiple clients mounting the same bucket
- no hard links
- inotify detects only local modifications, not external ones by other clients or tools
Lets get started by installing s3fs
:
# For Fedora
sudo dnf install s3fs-fuse
# For Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install s3fs
We’ll then need to edit /etc/passwd-s3fs
with our object storage access and secret keys:
AccessKeyHere:SecretKeyHere
Then we need to set it so that only root can read /etc/passwd-s3fs
sudo chmod 600 /etc/passwd-s3fs
Now we can test to see if we can access our bucket:
sudo s3fs bucketname \
/mnt/mountpoint \
-o url=https://us-east-1.linodeobjects.com \
-o allow_other
If we’re successful we should be able to access /mnt/mountpoint
.
To unmount:
sudo umount /mnt/mountpoint
To mount automatically during reboot, add the following to /etc/fstab
:
bucketname /mnt/mountpoint fuse.s3fs _netdev,allow_other,url=https://us-east-1.linodeobjects.com 0 0
After editing /etc/fstab
you can run sudo mount -a
in order for it to load and mount any new entries.