In 2024, you are better off dropping the file system abstraction entirely and just embracing object storage abstractions (and ideally, immutable write-once obje

In 2024, you are better off dropping the file system abstraction entirely and just embracing object storage abstractions (and ideally, immutable write-once objects). Source: personal experience, I've done the EFS path and the S3-like path within the same system, and the latter was much easier to develop for and troubleshoot performance. It's also far cheaper to operate. You can have local caching, rapid "read what I wrote", etc. with very little engineering cost, no one at my company is dedicated to this because the abstraction is ridiculously simple: 1. It's object storage, not a file system. Embrace immutability. 2. When you write to S3, cache locally as well. 3. When you read from S3, check the cache first. Optionally cache locally on reads from S3. 4. Set cache sizes so you don't blow out local storage. 5. Tier your caches when needed to increase sharing. (Immutability makes this trivially safe.) All that's left is to manage 'checked out files' which is pretty easy when almost all of them are immutable anyway.