AWS put a file system on S3; I stress-tested it

I’ve spent over a decade telling anyone who’d listen that S3 is not a filesystem, which in retrospect was a really weird way to start some conversations. So when AWS launched S3 Files on Tuesday – which lets you mount an S3 bucket as an NFS share – I did what any reasonable person would do: I spun up an EC2 instance and started trying to break it.

I had about four hours before getting on the phone with Andy Warfield, the VP/Distinguished Engineer/preternaturally patient man who leads S3’s engineering whether he admits it or not, and a subset of the S3 team. I wanted to show up with data, not opinions. Opinions are cheap. Opinions about storage are dangerous. My opinions about storage are hilarious.

The good news: the core product is solid. I threw ten deliberate conflicts at it – writing to the same key from the NFS mount and the S3 API simultaneously – and S3 won every single one, converging in under two seconds with zero split-brain states. For anyone who’s had the…