What is the preferred method to mount an S3 bucket to Linux EC2 instances?

Question

I notice S3FS and AWS Mountpoint as available options to mount an S3 bucket. There are key limitations to both, but I just need a share that can be accessed across many EC2 instances where users can read/write/delete/rename files and folders.  Throughput and performance are not important in this scenario, but the ability to rename and delete files/folders is important.  Does anyone have any suggestions on this please?

Answer

Take a look at [storage gateway](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/filegateway/latest/files3/create-gateway-file.html). Choose the EC2 option.

Answer

The lowest cost way of just mounting a bucket as a file-system would be to use [Mountpoint for S3](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/features/mountpoint/). This is an open-source file client that you can use to mount an S3 bucket on your compute instance and access it as a local file system.

Storage Gateway is your other option - but that can be more expensive.

If you just want to sync files from a local file-system to S3 in EC2 - then just use the AWS CLI together with the [S3 Sync](https://awscli.amazonaws.com/v2/documentation/api/latest/reference/s3/sync.html) command.

Consider also using an [S3 Gateway Endpoint](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/privatelink/vpc-endpoints-s3.html) in the VPC that your EC2 instance lives in - this will mean that traffic to S3 will not pass through your Internet Gateway - and thus not count as egress traffic from EC2.

What is the preferred method to mount an S3 bucket to Linux EC2 instances?

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