“A lot of people will be inappropriately, but deliriously, happy about this”, added AWS’s head of developer relations for high-performance computing, Brendan Bouffler.

That “easy” is Amazon’s term and in quotation marks because AWS admits openly that Mountpoint, which is written in Rust, doesn’t support writes yet and in the future “will only support sequential writes to new objects… not yet ready for use in production workloads, but we’d love for you to kick the tires and let us know what you think” its developers said. Mountpoint runs on your compute node of choice (perhaps unsurprisingly, Amazon gives the examples of an EC2 instance or Amazon EKS pod) and mounts an S3 bucket to a directory on your local file system. Amazon has open-sourced a new file client for S3 called Mountpoint for Amazon S3 that makes it “easy” for Linux-based applications to connect directly to Amazon S3 buckets and access objects using file APIs – not something that has always been easy or indeed possible for Linux-based large-scale analytics applications.

Linux s3 client