AWS has launched S3 Files, a new feature that adds native NFS v4.1+ file system access to S3 buckets. Unlike previous workarounds such as s3fs-fuse, Mountpoint for S3, or S3 File Gateway, S3 Files is built on top of Amazon EFS rather than emulating a file system over the S3 API. This enables full file operations including in-place edits, file locking, and directory renames, with ~1ms latency for actively cached data. It connects AWS compute resources (EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, Fargate) directly to existing S3 buckets with no migration required. A two-tier caching architecture automatically places hot data in high-performance storage while serving large sequential reads directly from S3. The feature is positioned for workloads requiring shared, collaborative access to data already in S3, such as ML training pipelines and agentic AI workflows.
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