Can you mount s3

In this article, we will show you how to mount an Amazon S3 bucket as file storage and discuss its advantages and drawbacks. It is important to note that AWS does not recommend the use of Amazon S3 as a block-level file system. Can EC2 mount Amazon S3? Using this method enables multiple Amazon EC2 instances to concurrently mount and access data in Amazon S3, just like a shared file system.

Why use an Amazon S3 file system? In some cases, mounting Amazon S3 as drive on an application server can make creating a distributed file store extremely easy. For example, when creating a photo upload application, you can have it store data on a fixed path in a file system and when deploying you can mount an Amazon S3 bucket on that fixed path. This way, the application will write all files in the bucket without you having to worry about Amazon S3 integration at the application level.

Another major advantage is to enable legacy applications to scale in the cloud since there are no source code changes required to use an Amazon S3 bucket as storage backend: the application can be configured to use a local path where the Amazon S3 bucket is mounted. This technique is also very helpful when you want to collect logs from various servers in a central location for archiving.

There are a few different ways for mounting Amazon S3 as a local drive on linux-based systems, which also support setups where you have Amazon S3 mount EC2.

Mounting an Amazon S3 bucket using S3FS is a simple process: by following the steps below, you should be able to start experimenting with using Amazon S3 as a drive on your computer immediately. The first step is to get S3FS installed on your machine. To install HomeBrew: 1. Brew install s3fs, as shown below. On Ubuntu To do that, run the command below: chmod After mounting Amazon S3 cloud storage with S3FS to your Linux machine, you can use cp , mv , rm , and other commands in the Linux console to operate with files as you do when working with mounted local or network drives.

A fresh installation of Ubuntu is used in this walkthrough. The IAM user must have S3 full access. You can use this link:.

Note: It is recommended to mount Amazon S3 buckets as a regular user with restricted permissions and use users with administrative permissions only for generating keys. The administrator can generate the AWS keys for a user account in the Users section of the AWS console in the Security credentials tab by clicking the Create access key button.

In the Create access key popup window click Download. This is the only case when you can see the secret access key in the AWS web interface. Go back to the Ubuntu console to create a configuration file for storing the AWS access key and secret access key needed to mount an S3 bucket with S3FS. The command to do this is:. In this example, we will store the configuration file with the AWS keys in the home directory of our user.

Make sure that you store the file with the keys in a safe place that is not accessible by unauthorized persons. Create the directory mount point that will be used as a mount point for your S3 bucket. The name of the bucket used in this walkthrough is blog-bucket The text1.

It is not recommended to use a dot. Use the following command to set the bucket name, the path to the directory used as the mount point and the file that contains the AWS access key and secret access key. The bucket is mounted. We can run the commands to check whether our bucket blog-bucket has been mounted to the s3-bucket directory:. As you can see on the screenshot below, the test1.

Now you can try to create a new file on your hard disk drive and copy that file to the S3 bucket in your Linux console.

Update the AWS web page where your files in the bucket are displayed. You should see the new test2. Note : If vim the text editor has not been installed yet in your Linux, run the apt-get install vim command.

You can set the number of times to retry mounting a bucket if the bucket was not mounted initially by using the retries parameter. Reboot the Ubuntu machine to check whether the S3 bucket is mounted automatically on system boot:. You can run commands to check whether the AWS S3 bucket was mounted automatically to the s3-bucket directory son Ubuntu boot.

In our case, the Amazon cloud drive S3 has been mounted automatically to the specified Linux directory on Ubuntu boot see the screenshot below.

The configuration was applied successfully. In this example, macOS Install homebrew , which is a package manager for macOS used to install applications from online software repositories:.

You can define keys for the current session if you need to mount the bucket for one time or you are going to mount the bucket infrequently:. Cache the READ requests for files smaller than: XX Mb - if enabled, TntDrive will cache portions of files requested by the calling application, for subsequent requests of the same block the cached copy will be returned.

By specifying XX Mb you may set the max file size to cache the requests for. Local disk is used to keep the cached data. You may configure cache location in Tools, Options, Advanced. Cached file blocks are valid for the period specified by the Limit time to live of cached items option described below. Cached file will be used for all further READ requests.

By specifying XX Mb you may set the max file size to prefetch. Local disk is used to keep the file. Cached file is valid for the period specified by the Limit time to live of cached items option described below. Limit time to live of cached items: XX Seconds - specifies how long the cached data remain valid. If the time interval between the time the item was cached and current time is greater than XX Seconds fresh copy will be requested from the server.

You may use the following command to reset the cache manually: Drives - [Drive] - Reset Cache.. You may also reset the cache from command line interface. Map S3 Bucket to Windows Drive. Twitter Facebook RSS. RdpGuard Intrusion prevention system for your Windows Server. All rights reserved. Terms of Use.

Privacy Policy. S3 Client. The following window appears when you start TntDrive: TntDrive Dashboard - displays all mapped drives and lets you add new mapped drives This is the main application window, it shows all mapped drives and lets you add new mapped drives or edit existing drives. Choose the storage account TntDrive supports various storage types , please choose the storage account you want to work with. Select an Amazon S3 Bucket to map Click on the folder icon to get buckets list from the storage and choose desired bucket and optional path.

Specify Mapped Drive Letter This letter will be assigned to the mapped drive.