Is it possible to 'mount', for ignorance of a better term, a cloud service like as Cloud Files or S3 to a linux / ubuntu server?

Ideally I'd like to be able to browse the remote location as if it were a local directory.

How is this done, if possible?

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5 Answers

How about s3fs? Performance is going to be pretty bad, but I know it's used with satisfaction by many people.

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Performance really isn't that bad in the newer versions :) – uidzer0 Aug 30 '11 at 17:57
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Judging from this discussion:

http://www.jungledisk.com and http://www.elasticdrive.com should do what you ask (never tried it).

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Yup, you can use RS Cloud Files storage (or S3) as backing for a JungleDisk setup. – phoebus Dec 31 '09 at 22:00
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The Rackspace version of s3fs mentioned above is 'cloudfuse' and can be found here:

http://github.com/redbo/cloudfuse/

In both cases the solution is similar - a FUSE based connection.

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S3QL provides a full featured UNIX filesystem for Amazon S3 buckets and even arbitrary SFTP servers.

They have a comparison page where they list the features compared to those of other filesystems for S3 like S3FS and S3Backer.

I've been using S3FS on an Ubuntu machine for a while but it doesn't support UNIX permissions. S3QL handles permissions and also offers encryption and compression. I highly recommend it.

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The problem with cloudfuse is that it doesn't support full Unix filesystem semantics (you can't set the date/time stamp on files/objects once they're uploaded, and iirc you can't set user/group permissions), and it doesn't support things like symlinks or hard links. It also fully caches everything to be written to the local disk before it uploads anything, and it doesn't do chunking for the content to be uploaded.

All that makes it pretty tough to use as an remote filesystem alternative.

S3ql would be a lot closer to a proper remote filesystem alternative, if I could get confirmation that it does actually support using Rackspace Cloud Files as a backend, either directly or indirectly through a compatibility layer.

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