Back to the basics: Using Object Storage as local file system with OCIFS

For using object storage like a file system, we used to and still have Storage Gateway to mount OCI Object Storage like an NFS mount target. It was only available on Linux 7, it required Docker and some resources (not small). For Windows rclone , a third party solution was the answer, and I wrote about it here in one of my old blog post

Now we have another alternative, recently announced OCIFS, pretty much does the same thing. It requires Oracle Linux 8 or later, and less demanding resources.

1 Installation is easy, on OLE8 instance, I ran dnf install command. And as you see it has a very small size.

[opc@ocifs-demo ~]$ sudo dnf install ocifs
Total download size: 156 k
Installed size: 360 k
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
(1/2): ocifs-1.1.0-2.el8.x86_64.rpm               824 kB/s |  73 kB     00:00
(2/2): fuse-2.9.7-16.0.1.el8.x86_64.rpm           446 kB/s |  83 kB     00:00
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total                                             824 kB/s | 156 kB     00:00

2 For authentication I used API Key method. I have just copied my OCI CLI config file and key file to default locations, so I didn't have to pass any parameters. I didn't even install cli itself. Then I mount object storage bucket "ocifs-mounted-bucket" to "mydir" folder

[opc@ocifs-demo ~]$ ocifs ocifs-mounted-bucket mydir
[opc@ocifs-demo ~]$ cd mydir/
[opc@ocifs-demo mydir]$ mkdir new-folder-01
[opc@ocifs-demo mydir]$ mkdir new-folder-02
[opc@ocifs-demo mydir]$ history > new-folder-01/history.txt

Note

If your instance is running on OCI, you can also use instance principals for authentication

ocifs --auth=instance_principal ocifs-mounted-bucket mydir

For non-default config file, you can use config parameter for passing config file location

ocifs --auth=api_key --config=~/my_config ocifs-mounted-bucket mydir

3 Can be unmounted with any of these commands

fusermount -u mydir
sudo umount mydir

By the way, there is a Python library with the same name, ocifs which also enables python to use object storage like a file system.

References:
1. OCI Documentation: Storage Gateway
2. RClone: Mounting Object Storage on Windows
3. OCI Blog: Introducing OCIFS
4. OCI Documentation: OCIFS Utility
5. OCI Documentation: Install OCI CLI on OLE8
6. Oracle GitHub: OCIFS Python Library