12.7 Cloud Storage

Speaking of cloud backups, another network file storage option is cloud storage, such as AWS S3 or Google Cloud Storage. These systems don’t have the performance of storage on a local network, but they do offer two significant advantages: you never have to maintain them, and you shouldn’t have to worry about backups.

Aside from the web (and programmatic) interfaces that all cloud storage providers offer, there are ways to mount most kinds of cloud storage on a Linux system. Unlike most of the filesystems that we’ve seen so far, these are nearly all implemented as FUSE (File System in User Space) interfaces. For some popular cloud storage providers such as S3, there are even multiple options. This makes sense, because a FUSE handler is nothing more than a user-space daemon that acts as an intermediary between the data source and the kernel.

This book doesn’t cover the specifics of setting up a cloud storage client, because every one is different.