NAME¶

s3backer — FUSE-based single file backing store via Amazon S3

SYNOPSIS¶

DESCRIPTION¶

s3backer is a filesystem that contains a single file backed by the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). As a filesystem, it is very simple: it provides a single normal file having a fixed size. Underneath, the file is divided up into blocks, and the content of each block is stored in a unique Amazon S3 object. In other words, what s3backer provides is really more like an S3-backed virtual hard disk device, rather than a filesystem.

In typical usage, a `normal' filesystem is mounted on top of the file exported by the s3backer filesystem using a loopback mount (or disk image mount on Mac OS X).

This arrangement has several benefits compared to more complete S3 filesystem implementations:

o

By not attempting to implement a complete filesystem, which is a complex undertaking and difficult to get right, s3backer can stay very lightweight and simple. Only three HTTP operations are used: GET, PUT, and DELETE. All of the experience and knowledge about how to properly implement filesystems that already exists can be reused.

o

By utilizing existing filesystems, you get full UNIX filesystem semantics. Subtle bugs or missing functionality relating to hard links, extended attributes, POSIX locking, etc. are avoided.

o

The gap between normal filesystem semantics and Amazon S3 ``eventual consistency'' is more easily and simply solved when one can interpret S3 objects as simple device blocks rather than filesystem objects (see below).

o

When storing your data on Amazon S3 servers, which are not under your control, the ability to encrypt and authenticate data becomes a critical issue. s3backer supports secure encryption and authentication. Alternately, the encryption capability built into the Linux loopback device can be used.

o

Since S3 data is accessed over the network, local caching is also very important for performance reasons. Since s3backer presents the equivalent of a virtual hard disk to the kernel, most of the filesystem caching can be done where it should be: in the kernel, via the kernel's page cache. However s3backer also includes its own internal block cache for increased performance, using asynchronous worker threads to take advantage of the parallelism inherent in the network.

OPTIONS¶

Each command line flag has two forms, for example --accessFile=FILE and -o accessFile=FILE. Only the first form is shown below. Either form many be used; both are equivalent. The second form allows mount options to be specified directly in /etc/fstab and passed seamlessly to s3backer by FUSE.

--accessFile=FILE

Specify a file containing `accessID:accessKey' pairs, one per-line. Blank lines and lines beginning with a `#' are ignored. If no --accessKey is specified, this file will be searched for the entry matching the access ID specified via --accessId; if neither --accessKey nor --accessId is specified, the first entry in this file will be used. Default value is $HOME/.s3backer_passwd.

--accessId=ID

Specify Amazon S3 access ID. Specify an empty string to force no access ID. If no access ID is specified (and none is found in the access file) then s3backer will still function, but only reads of publicly available filesystems will work.

--accessKey=KEY

Specify Amazon S3 access key. To avoid publicizing this secret via the command line, use --accessFile instead of this flag.

--accessType=TYPE

Specify the Amazon S3 access privilege ACL type for newly written blocks. The value must be one of `private', `public-read', `public-read-write', or `authenticated-read'. Default is `private'.

--accessEC2IAM=ROLE

Download access credentials and security token in JSON document form from http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/iam/security-credentials/ROLE every five minutes.

This option allows S3 credentials to be provided automatically via the specified IAM role to s3backer when running on an Amazon EC2 instance.

--authVersion=TYPE

Specify how to authenticate requests. There are two supported authentication methods: aws2 is the original AWS authentication scheme. aws4 is the newer, recommended authentication scheme.

aws4 is the default setting starting in version 1.4, and is required for certain non-US regions, while aws2 may still be required by some non-Amazon S3 providers.

--baseURL=URL

Specify the base URL, which must end in a forward slash. Default is `http://s3.amazonaws.com/'.

--blockCacheFile=FILE

Specify a file in which to store cached data blocks. Without this flag, the block cache lives entirely in process memory and the cached data disappears when s3backer is stopped. The file will be created if it doesn't exist.

Cache files that have been created by previous invocations of s3backer are reusable as long as they were created with the same configured block size (if not, startup will fail). This is true even if s3backer was stopped abruptly, e.g., due to a system crash; however, this guarantee rests on the assumption that the filesystem containing the cache file will not reorder writes across calls to fsync(2).

If an existing cache is used but was created with a different size, s3backer will automatically expand or shrink the file at startup. When shrinking, blocks that don't fit in the new, smaller cache are discarded. This process also compacts the cache file to the extent possible.

By default, only clean cache blocks are recoverable after a restart. This means a system crash will cause dirty blocks in the cache to be lost (of course, that is the case with an in-memory cache as well).

With the newer cache file format introduced in release 1.5.0, you can recover these dirty blocks by specifying the --blockCacheRecoverDirtyBlocks option. This will cause any dirty blocks in the cache file to be made writable again on startup. If your cache file was created with a prior release of s3backer or you do not specify this option, dirty blocks in the cache file are discarded on startup. The window of this data loss can be limited by --blockCacheWriteDelay.

By default, when having reloaded the cache from a cache file, s3backer will verify the MD5 checksum of each reloaded block with Amazon S3 before its first use. This verify operation does not require actually reading the block's data, and therefore is relatively quick. This guards against the cached data having unknowingly gotten out of sync since the cache file was last used, a situation that is otherwise impossible for s3backer to detect.

--blockCacheMaxDirty=NUM

Specify a limit on the number of dirty blocks in the block cache. When this limit is reached, subsequent write attempts will block until an existing dirty block is successfully written (and therefore becomes no longer dirty). This flag limits the amount of inconsistency there can be with respect to the underlying S3 data store.

The default value is zero, which means no limit.

--blockCacheNoVerify

Disable the MD5 verification of blocks loaded from a cache file specified via --blockCacheFile. Using this flag is dangerous; use only when you are sure the cached file is uncorrupted and the data it contains is up to date.

--blockCacheSize=SIZE

Specify the block cache size (in number of blocks). Each entry in the cache will consume approximately block size plus 20 bytes. A value of zero disables the block cache. Default value is 1000.

--blockCacheThreads=NUM

Set the size of the thread pool associated with the block cache (if enabled). This bounds the number of simultaneous writes that can occur to the network. Default value is 20.

--blockCacheTimeout=MILLIS

Specify the maximum time a clean entry can remain in the block cache before it will be forcibly evicted and its associated memory freed. A value of zero means there is no timeout; in this case, the number of entries in the block cache will never decrease, eventually reaching the maximum size configured by --blockCacheSize and staying there. Configure a non-zero value if the memory usage of the block cache is a concern. Default value is zero (no timeout).

--blockCacheWriteDelay=MILLIS

Specify the maximum time a dirty block can remain in the block cache before it must be written out to the network. Blocks may be written sooner when there is cache pressure. A value of zero configures a ``write-through'' policy; greater values configure a ``write-back'' policy. Larger values increase performance when a small number of blocks are accessed repeatedly, at the cost of greater inconsistency with the underlying S3 data store. Default value is 250 milliseconds.

--blockCacheSync

Forces synchronous writes in the block cache layer. Instead of returning immediately and scheduling the actual write to operation happen later, write requests will not return until the write has completed. This flag is a stricter requirement than --blockCacheWriteDelay=0, which merely causes the writes to be initiated as soon as possible (but still after the write request returns).

This flag requires --blockCacheWriteDelay to be zero. Using this flag is likely to drastically reduce write performance.

--blockCacheRecoverDirtyBlocks

An unclean dismount may leave dirty blocks (blocks written to the local cache file, but not yet flushed to S3) in the cache file.

If this option is set, s3backer will recover any such dirty blocks and eventually write them back to S3. If this option is not specified, all dirty data in the cache file are discarded on startup.

If the filesystem has been mounted since the cache file was last used, s3backer will refuse to mount. This is verified by checking a unique 32-bit mount token in the cache file against the 'already mounted' flag in the data store.

This flag requires --blockCacheFile to be set.

--blockHashPrefix

Prepend random prefixes (generated deterministically from the block number) to block object names. This spreads requests more evenly across the namespace, and prevents heavy access to a narrow range of blocks from all being directed to the same backend server.

As with --prefix, this flag must be used consistently once a disk image is established.

--blockSize=SIZE

Specify the block size. This must be a power of two and should be a multiple of the kernel's native page size. The size may have an optional suffix 'K' for kilobytes, 'M' for megabytes, etc.

s3backer supports partial block operations, though this forces a read before each write; use of the block cache and proper alignment of the s3backer block size with the intended use (e.g., the block size of the `upper' filesystem) will help minimize the extra reads. Note that even when filesystems are configured for large block sizes, the kernel will often still write page-sized blocks.

s3backer will attempt to auto-detect the block size by reading block number zero at startup. If this option is not specified, the auto-detected value will be used. If this option is specified but disagrees with the auto-detected value, s3backer will exit with an error unless --force is also given. If auto-detection fails because block number zero does not exist, and this option is not specified, then the default value of 4K (4096) is used.

--cacert=FILE

Specify SSL certificate file to be used when verifying the remote server's identity when operating over SSL connections. Equivalent to the --cacert flag documented in curl(1).

--compress[=LEVEL]

Compress blocks before sending them over the network. This should result in less network traffic (in both directions) and lower storage costs.

The compression level is optional; if given, it must be between 1 (fast compression) and 9 (most compression), inclusive. If omitted, the default compression level is used.

This flag only enables compression of newly written blocks; decompression is always enabled and applied when appropriate. Therefore, it is safe to switch this flag on or off between different invocations of s3backer on the same filesystem.

This flag is automatically enabled when --encrypt is used, though you may also specify --compress=LEVEL to set a non-default compression level.

When using an encrypted upper layer filesystem, this flag adds no value because the data will not be compressible.

--directIO

Disable kernel caching of the backed file. This will force the kernel to always pass reads and writes directly to s3backer. This reduces performance but also eliminates one source of inconsistency.

--debug

Enable logging of debug messages. Note that this flag is different from -d, which is a flag to FUSE; however, the -d FUSE flag implies this flag.

--debug-http

Enable printing of HTTP headers to standard output.

--defaultContentEncoding=VALUE

Use this to workaround S3 backends that fail to send back the Content-Encoding header that was sent to them by s3backer. If a block read response contains no Content-Encoding header, this value will be substituted.

If you get errors complaining that the content was expected to be encrypted, try setting this to deflate,encrypt-AES-128-CBC.

--encrypt[=CIPHER]

Enable encryption and authentication of block data. See your OpenSSL documentation for a list of supported ciphers; the default if no cipher is specified is AES-128 CBC.

The encryption password may be supplied via one of --password or --passwordFile. If neither flag is given, s3backer will ask for the password at startup.

Note: the actual key used is derived by hashing the password, the bucket name, the prefix name (if any), and the block number. Therefore, encrypted data cannot be ported to different buckets or prefixes.

This flag implies --compress.

--erase

Completely erase the file system by deleting all non-zero blocks, clear the 'already mounted' flag, and then exit. User confirmation is required unless the --force flag is also given. Note, no simultaneous mount detection is performed in this case.

This option implies --listBlocks.

--filename=NAME

Specify the name of the backed file that appears in the s3backer filesystem. Default is `file'.

--fileMode=MODE

Specify the UNIX permission bits for the backed file that appears in the s3backer filesystem. Default is 0600, unless --readOnly is specified, in which case the default is 0400.

--force

Proceed even if the value specified by --blockSize or --size disagrees with the auto-detected value, or s3backer detects that another s3backer instance is still mounted on top of the same S3 bucket (and prefix). In any of these cases, proceeding will lead to corrupted data, so the --force flag should be avoided for normal use.

The simultaneous mount detection can produce a false positive when a previous s3backer instance was not shut down cleanly. In this case, don't use --force but rather run s3backer once with the --reset-mounted-flag flag.

If --erase is given, --force causes s3backer to proceed without user confirmation.

-h --help

Print a help message and exit.

--initialRetryPause=MILLIS

Specify the initial pause time in milliseconds before the first retry attempt after failed HTTP operations. Failures include network failures and timeouts, HTTP errors, and reads of stale data (i.e., MD5 mismatch); s3backer will make multiple retry attempts using an exponential backoff algorithm, starting with this initial retry pause time. Default value is 200ms. See also --maxRetryPause.

--insecure

Do not verify the remote server's identity when operating over SSL connections. Equivalent to the --insecure flag documented in curl(1).

--keyLength

Override the length of the generated block encryption key.

Versions of s3backer prior to 1.3.6 contained a bug where the length of the generated encryption key was fixed but system-dependent, causing it to be possibly incompatible on different systems for some ciphers. In version 1.3.6, this bug was corrected; however, in some cases this changed the generated key length, making the encryption no longer compatible with previously written data. This flag can be used to force the older, fixed key length. The value you want to use is whatever is defined for EVP_MAX_KEY_LENGTH on your system, typically 64.

It is an error to specify a value smaller than the cipher's natural key length; however, a value of zero is allowed and is equivalent to not specifying anything.

--listBlocks

Perform a query at startup to determine which blocks already exist. This enables optimizations whereby, for each block that does not yet exist, reads return zeroes and zeroed writes are omitted, thereby eliminating any network access. This flag is useful when creating a new backed file, or any time it is expected that a large number of zeroed blocks will be read or written, such as when initializing a new filesystem.

This flag will slow down startup in direct proportion to the number of blocks that already exist.

--maxUploadSpeed=BITSPERSEC

 

--maxDownloadSpeed=BITSPERSEC

These flags set a limit on the bandwidth utilized for individual block uploads and downloads (i.e., the setting applies on a per-thread basis). The limits only apply to HTTP payload data and do not include any additional overhead from HTTP or TCP headers, etc.

The value is measured in bits per second, and abbreviations like `256k', `1m', etc. may be used. By default, there is no fixed limit.

Use of these flags may also require setting the --timeout flag to a higher value.

--maxRetryPause=MILLIS

Specify the total amount of time in milliseconds s3backer should pause when retrying failed HTTP operations before giving up. Failures include network failures and timeouts, HTTP errors, and reads of stale data (i.e., MD5 mismatch); s3backer will make multiple retry attempts using an exponential backoff algorithm, up to this maximum total retry pause time. This value does not include the time it takes to perform the HTTP operations themselves (use --timeout for that). Default value is 30000 (30 seconds). See also --initialRetryPause.

--minWriteDelay=MILLIS

Specify a minimum time in milliseconds between the successful completion of a write and the initiation of another write to the same block. This delay ensures that S3 doesn't receive the writes out of order. This value must be set to zero when --md5CacheSize is set to zero (MD5 cache disabled). Default value is 500ms.

--md5CacheSize=SIZE

Specify the size of the MD5 checksum cache (in number of blocks). If the cache is full when a new block is written, the write will block until there is room. Therefore, it is important to configure --md5CacheTime and --md5CacheSize according to the frequency of writes to the filesystem overall and to the same block repeatedly. Alternately, a value equal to the number of blocks in the filesystem eliminates this problem but consumes the most memory when full (each entry in the cache is approximately 40 bytes). A value of zero disables the MD5 cache. Default value is 1000.

--md5CacheTime=MILLIS

Specify in milliseconds the time after a block has been successfully written for which the MD5 checksum of the block's contents should be cached, for the purpose of detecting stale data during subsequent reads. A value of zero means `infinite' and provides a guarantee against reading stale data; however, you should only do this when --md5CacheSize is configured to be equal to the number of blocks; otherwise deadlock will (eventually) occur. This value must be at least as big as --minWriteDelay. This value must be set to zero when --md5CacheSize is set to zero (MD5 cache disabled). Default value is 10 seconds.

The MD5 checksum cache is not persisted across restarts. Therefore, to ensure the same eventual consistency protection while s3backer is not running, you must delay at least --md5CacheTime milliseconds between stopping and restarting s3backer.

--noAutoDetect

Disable block and file size auto-detection at startup. If this flag is given, then the block size defaults to 4096 and the --size flag is required.

--password=PASSWORD

Supply the password for encryption and authentication as a command-line parameter.

--passwordFile=FILE

Read the password for encryption and authentication from (the first line of) the specified file.

--prefix=STRING

Specify a prefix to prepend to the resource names within bucket that identify each block. By using different prefixes, multiple independent s3backer disks can live in the same S3 bucket.

The default prefix is the empty string.

--quiet

Suppress progress output during initial startup.

--readAhead=NUM

Configure the number of blocks of read ahead. This determines how many blocks will be read into the block cache ahead of the last block read by the kernel when read ahead is active. This option has no effect if the block cache is disabled. Default value is 4.

--readAheadTrigger=NUM

Configure the number of blocks that must be read consecutively before the read ahead algorithm is triggered. Once triggered, read ahead will continue as long as the kernel continues reading blocks sequentially. This option has no effect if the block cache is disabled. Default value is 2.

--readOnly

Assume the filesystem is going to be mounted read-only, and return EROFS in response to any attempt to write. This flag also changes the default mode of the backed file from 0600 to 0400 and disables the MD5 checksum cache.

--region=REGION

Specify an AWS region. This flag changes the default base URL to include the region name and automatically sets the --vhost flag.

--reset-mounted-flag

Reset the 'already mounted' flag on the underlying S3 data store.

s3backer detects simultaneous mounts by checking a special flag. If a previous invocation of s3backer was not shut down cleanly, the flag may not have been cleared. Running s3backer --erase will clear it manually. But see also BUGS below.

--rrs

Deprecated; equivalent to --storageClass=REDUCED_REDUNDANCY.

--size=SIZE

Specify the size (in bytes) of the backed file to be exported by the filesystem. The size may have an optional suffix 'K' for kilobytes, 'M' for megabytes, 'G' for gigabytes, 'T' for terabytes, 'E' for exabytes, 'Z' for zettabytes, or 'Y' for yottabytes. s3backer will attempt to auto-detect the size of the backed file by reading block number zero. If this option is not specified, the auto-detected value will be used. If this option is specified but disagrees with the auto-detected value, s3backer will exit with an error unless --force is also given.

--sse=ALGORITHM

Enable server side encryption. This adds the x-amz-server-side-encryption header to all PUT requests.

Currently the only supported encryption algorithm is AES256.

--ssl

Equivalent to --baseURL https://s3.amazonaws.com/

--statsFilename=NAME

Specify the name of the human-readable statistics file that appears in the s3backer filesystem. A value of empty string disables the appearance of this file. Default is `stats'.

--storageClass=TYPE

Specify storage class.

Valid values are: STANDARD, STANDARD_IA, and REDUCED_REDUNDANCY.

The default is STANDARD.

--test

Operate in local test mode. Filesystem blocks are stored as regular files in the directory dir. No network traffic occurs.

Note if dir is a relative pathname (and -f is not given) it will be resolved relative to the root directory.

--timeout=SECONDS

Specify a time limit in seconds for one HTTP operation attempt. This limits the entire operation including connection time (if not already connected) and data transfer time. The default is 30 seconds; this value may need to be adjusted upwards to avoid premature timeouts on slower links and/or when using a large number of block cache worker threads.

See also --maxRetryPause.

--version

Output version and exit.

--vhost

Force virtual hosted style requests. For example, this will cause s3backer to use the URL http://mybucket.s3.amazonaws.com/path/uri instead of http://s3.amazonaws.com/mybucket/path/uri.

This flag is required when S3 buckets have been created with location constraints (for example `EU buckets'). Put another way, this flag is required for buckets defined outside of the US region. This flag is automatically set when the --region flag is used.

In addition, s3backer accepts all of the generic FUSE options as well. Here is a partial list:

-o uid=UID

Override the user ID of the backed file, which defaults to the current user ID.

-o gid=GID

Override the group ID of the backed file, which defaults to the current group ID.

-o sync_read

Do synchronous reads.

-o max_readahead=NUM

Set maximum read-ahead (in bytes).

-f

Run in the foreground (do not fork). Causes logging to be sent to standard error.

-d

Enable FUSE debug mode. Implies -f.

-s

Run in single-threaded mode.

In addition, s3backer passes the following flags which are optimized for s3backer to FUSE (unless overridden by the user on the command line):

-o kernel_cache

 

-o fsname=<baseURL><bucket>/<prefix>

 

-o subtype=s3backer

 

-o use_ino

 

-o entry_timeout=31536000

 

-o negative_timeout=31536000

 

-o max_readahead=0

 

-o attr_timeout=0

 

-o default_permissions

 

-o allow_other

 

-o nodev

 

-o nosuid

 

FILES¶

$HOME/.s3backer_passwd

Contains Amazon S3 `accessID:accessKey' pairs.

SEE ALSO¶

curl(1), losetup(8), mount(8), umount(8), fusermount(8).

s3backer: FUSE-based single file backing store via Amazon S3, https://github.com/archiecobbs/s3backer.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), http://aws.amazon.com/s3.

FUSE: Filesystem in Userspace, http://fuse.sourceforge.net/.

MacFUSE: A User-Space File System Implementation Mechanism for Mac OS X, http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/.

FUSE for OS X, https://osxfuse.github.io/.

Google Search for `linux page cache', http://www.google.com/search?q=linux+page+cache.

BUGS¶

Due to a design flaw in FUSE, an unmount of the s3backer filesystem will complete successfully before s3backer has finished writing back all dirty blocks. Therefore, when using the block cache, attempts to remount the same bucket and prefix may fail with an 'already mounted' error while the former s3backer process finishes flushing its cache. Before assuming a false positive and using --reset-mounted-flag, ensure that any previous s3backer process attached to the same bucket and prefix has exited. See issue #40 for details.

For cache space efficiency, s3backer uses 32 bit values to index individual blocks. Therefore, the block size must be increased beyond the default 4K when very large filesystems (greater than 16 terabytes) are created.

s3backer should really be implemented as a device rather than a filesystem. However, this would require writing a kernel module instead of a simple user-space daemon, because Linux does not provide a user-space API for devices like it does for filesystems with FUSE. Implementing s3backer as a filesystem and then using the loopback mount is a simple workaround.

On Mac OS X, the kernel imposes its own timeout (600 seconds) on FUSE operations, and automatically unmounts the filesystem when this limit is reached. This can happen when a combination of --maxRetryPause and/or --timeout settings allow HTTP retries to take longer than this value. A warning is emitted on startup in this case.

Filesystem size is limited by the maximum allowable size of a single file.

The default block size of 4k is non-optimal from a compression and cost perspective. Typically, users will want a larger value to maximize compression and minimize transaction costs, e.g., 1m.

AUTHOR¶

Archie L. Cobbs ⟨archie@dellroad.org⟩