> Is this only needed if you want properly faked file system primitives over blob stores, if you can't use blob stores directly?
Semiconductor EDA comes to mind, where users are at the mercy of their tool vendors and they expect something that really hasn't evolved much past an office network of Unix workstations from 1999. Object storage is almost completely alien to the tooling, and despite significant file & block storage costs there is little interest from EDA tool vendors to adapt their tools to object storage. This is a challenge for semiconductor firms operating in or moving to a cloud environment.
S3FS/rclone can of course act as a shim, but are very slow when it comes to metadata operations in a typical shell. But if you were to move your metadata away from the distant object store and closer to to your compute environment things actually start becoming usable - this is the case with JuiceFS. Of course there are also tiered storage systems like Weka would have better overall performance, but is more complicated to set up and more expensive to operate than JuiceFS.
Semiconductor EDA comes to mind, where users are at the mercy of their tool vendors and they expect something that really hasn't evolved much past an office network of Unix workstations from 1999. Object storage is almost completely alien to the tooling, and despite significant file & block storage costs there is little interest from EDA tool vendors to adapt their tools to object storage. This is a challenge for semiconductor firms operating in or moving to a cloud environment.
S3FS/rclone can of course act as a shim, but are very slow when it comes to metadata operations in a typical shell. But if you were to move your metadata away from the distant object store and closer to to your compute environment things actually start becoming usable - this is the case with JuiceFS. Of course there are also tiered storage systems like Weka would have better overall performance, but is more complicated to set up and more expensive to operate than JuiceFS.