goofys VS gcsfuse

The author needs to ask themselves: in this cloud technology stack, is there POSIX involved somewhere lower down, where I can't access it? The answer is, of course, "yes". The sort of cloud storage systems described all run on top of POSIX APIs. They provide convenience (cost efficiency is more debatable) compared to the POSIX alternative, but that's because they exist at an entirely different conceptual layer (hence the presence of POSIX anyway, just buried).

Your point about surfacing a POSIX that's actually there but hidden and thus visible to low-level Amazon employees building the S3 service which makes it invisible to S3 end customers is true but isn't the the point of the article. The author is saying there are motivations for a POSIX-like api visible also the end user.

So your explanation of stack looks like 2 layers: POSIX api <-- AWS S3 built on top of that

Author's essay is actually talking about 3 layers: POSIX <-- AWS S3 <-- POSIX

That's why the blog post has the following links to POSIX-on-top-of-S3-objects :

https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse

https://github.com/kahing/goofys

https://www.cuno.io/

How is this different than these other solutions?

https://github.com/kahing/goofys

https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse

But now I ask.. why not s3fs? Is it the GPL licensing? Or even goofys that also have Apache2 licensing and seems to hit similar goals (non fully POSIX compliant)? Why build your own?

If your 20TB is in S3, use a staging box with goofys (https://github.com/kahing/goofys) to mount the commercial S3 bucket(s) into a folder, then use s3 sync to copy to your bucket(s) in GovCloud.

So, we just need to change the dataloader function a bit to make this work then. Did you try just mounting S3 using https://github.com/kahing/goofys. In this case, we need not even change the dataloader code. Not sure of the performance though.

We're using goofys as the mounting utility. It's a "high-performance, POSIX-ish Amazon S3 file system written in Go" based on FUSE (file system in user space) technology.

will probably experiment with https://github.com/kahing/goofys and https://litestream.io/ to make services more easily moved between the devices :) Also, will continue working on https://synpse.net/ to make the operations easier.

It uses FUSE and there's three types of Kernel cache you could use with FUSE (although, it seems like gcsfuse is exposing only one):

1. Cache of file attributes in the Kernel (this is controlled by "stat-cache-ttl" value - https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gcsfuse/blob/7dc5c7ff...)

You're looking at Filestore because your software can only write to a mounted file system? If so, you could mount a Google Cloud Storage bucket with Fuse. I haven't used Fuse myself in production, but it may be worth trying out for your workload.

Is this the same gcsfuse that's been around for years, only now with official Google support?

https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gcsfuse

I'm pretty sure the storage for a stopped VM vs a disk image will be the same. Cheaper if you can store your data in GCS bucket? Take a look at GCS-Fuse to mount storage buckets into a VM.

Currently being tracked here: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gcsfuse/issues/961