Hi Ben, thanks for your feedback. We will add more technical details and clarify the differences between objectivefs and s3fs-fuse.
ObjectiveFS is a log structured filesystem that we implemented completely from scratch. It is a POSIX filesystem and works with the existing Linux and OS X tools and software.
It's a complete POSIX filesystem, and we implement a log-structured filesystem on top of S3. So, you can use it with your regular programs expecting POSIX semantics.
Mounting S3 lets you view the objects in a bucket, but it doesn't behave like a regular file system.
s3fs-fuse is a one-to-one mapping and doesn't do things like atomic rename of directories, mutual exclusion of open exclusive, append to file requires rewriting the whole file and no hard links. This breaks the expectations of many linux programs.
Our implementation has these features and works with linux programs.
It's difficult to tell from your site - does it still use FUSE under the hood or is this a kernel-level FS? I'd check the RPMs if I could, but I can't download the RPM without signing up first.
We built ObjectiveFS, it's like Dropbox, but for servers. We have users running our shared file system in production, and are getting great feedback.
Our current challenges are user growth and upcoming competition from Amazon EFS.
We would like your feedback on what we can do on our website (http://objectivefs.com) or additional things we can do to get more people to start our free trial and to address the Amazon EFS competition.
Isn't NFS more of your competition? It looks like Amazon EFS is designed as a NFS competitor itself. Is your software better than NFS? As far as I can tell, everyone who uses NFS thinks it sucks. You will have a much easier time convincing people to switch from NFS to your stuff than from a not-yet-existing product to your stuff.
"Like Dropbox but for servers" doesn't seem like it's quite the right pitch. Because you also say, use this on your laptop. Maybe you want something more like, "Dropbox for teams of software engineers". Or just, "NFS that doesn't suck".
Thanks for your insightful comment. We are currently competing with NFS, GlusterFS & other distributed file systems. Our software is much easier to use, requires no storage cluster maintenance and has no single point of failure.
I like your suggestion on the pitch, especially the "NFS that doesn't suck". :-) We will work on improving our pitch. Thanks again!
We couldn't find a solution either, so we built a posix filesystem with S3 backend backend that is easy to run and scale. If you want to give ObjectiveFS (https://objectivefs.com) a try, I'll be happy to hear your feedback.
If you need something like EFS today, there is ObjectiveFS (https://ObjectiveFS.com), a posix cloud file system with S3 backend. Disclaimer: I am a co-founder :-)
1. We have strong end-to-end integrity checks and encryption on by default.
2. Amazon EFS's performance is dependent on the filesystem size: larger filesystems include more iops.