17 You’ve probably heard it before : “File is out, object is in.” Well, here at Scality, we have a more nuanced point of view: we believe file and object fit different use cases, and we surely recognize that for the small enterprise or the individual, a filesystem is much easier to use. It’s partly habit and education, but the fact remains that dumping everything into a bucket instead neatly organizing folders and subfolders can be challenging. Amazon S3 Yet the main actor in providing storage services, Amazon S3, uses buckets and objects. Since Scality offers both file and object, we understand why Amazon went the object way: in terms of development, it is a lot less challenging than offering a complete filesystem storage system. As our CTO Giorgio Regni likes to say “Amazon S3 has become the de facto standard for object storage.” I would add that, thus, object storage seems to have become the only good offer you can get for cloud storage… So how do you make the most of it without having to build naming strategies and so on? Fortunately, the open source community has an answer for you: s3fs. s3fs is a tool that allows you to mount a bucket and view its contents as a folders and files from the mountpoint. Therefore, it also allows you to add files/folders to your bucket via the mountpoint, which then get converted seamlessly to objects. And of course, since Scality S3 Server is fully transparent and compatible with Amazon S3, you can use s3fs over your local S3 storage. Exciting, isn’t it? Go ahead and give it a try! Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
