I need to know what the best (read: highly performant and fault tolerant) filesystem solution based on Amazon's S3 is. I have looked a s3fs, but I notice that it has not been worked on for a while now, and that got me thinking about stability and features.
What other filesystem solutions have you used and what has your experience been with it?
Maybe S3QL will be interesting to you. I am not going to praise it here (because I'm the developer), but there is a comparison of S3QL to other S3 file systems at http://code.google.com/p/s3ql/wiki/other_s3_filesystems.
You're not going to get anything that's "highly performant" (at least when compared to modern disk storage systems) when dealing with the latencies inherent with using remote storage. Performance is further hampered by the fact that the target "device" isn't a block device, which necessitates an abstraction layer that even further inhibits performance. S3 is at its best when used for what it was intended for, storing and retrieving individual files using http(s).
Regarding fault tolerance: here's an area where S3 excels. Standard S3 buckets will survive the failure of two of Amazon's facilities, which is quite good for what you're paying. If your needs aren't that stringent, they also recently released the slightly less redundant (but ~30% cheaper) RRS buckets, which are configured to survive the failure of one of Amazon's facilities.
Nasuni is a startup with a relatively low-cost cloud storage appliance. Worth looking into if you need to protect TBs of data on S3 simply.
p.s. I am not affiliated with the company, just a fan of the technology.
