this post will probably never be read but.. I was on the team that was trying to make the marriage of S3 and EFS work a year ago. it's a pretty hard problem. At one point we proposed this solution (which seems like a caching layer) but it got shot down for a more complex system that would have attempted to rebuild EFS on faster S3 blob storage. I left before this engineering monstrosity made significant progress, and it clearly died at some point.
Looks like they went back to a simpler solution they could deliver but with some obvious warts. good to see something get launched but the sausage making her was brutal.
The reality is that if you read https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/04/s3-files-and-th..., it sounds like the great minds at S3 figured out that a caching layer was the way to go. We (EFS) fucking proposed that years ago. But we had to deal with Seattle and the S3 braintrust who didn't want to do that. I know we wrote a PRFAQ that was close to this concept probably four years ago. The political story is that EFS was taking over by S3 and the EFS folks didn't have the agency or political backing to build a more workable solution. So we wasted a shit ton of time tackling something that was never going to work and many of the tenured EFS engineers left.
100% agree to this sentiment. Although Amazon/AWS seems to be overall innovative, amount of ideas and passion killed between the same meeting rooms the article describes as "innovating driving, heated conversations" are immense.
Obviously not the same, but at home I am running a Raspberry Pi with s3fs mounting my personal S3 bucket. I am exposing the same directory with /etc/exports (NFS). Which also allows me to use filesystem-caching as a bonus on the client side.
On the other hand, I should probably move out from S3 and use R2 or something...
How could they release something that doesn't support atomic rename and has no prospect of supporting atomic rename? Lots of workloads will crash and burn on this layer.
Looks like they went back to a simpler solution they could deliver but with some obvious warts. good to see something get launched but the sausage making her was brutal.
The reality is that if you read https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/04/s3-files-and-th..., it sounds like the great minds at S3 figured out that a caching layer was the way to go. We (EFS) fucking proposed that years ago. But we had to deal with Seattle and the S3 braintrust who didn't want to do that. I know we wrote a PRFAQ that was close to this concept probably four years ago. The political story is that EFS was taking over by S3 and the EFS folks didn't have the agency or political backing to build a more workable solution. So we wasted a shit ton of time tackling something that was never going to work and many of the tenured EFS engineers left.