S3QL

About S3QL

A file system that stores all its data online using storage services like Google Storage, Amazon S3, or OpenStack. S3QL provides a standard POSIX file system interface with features like deduplication, compression, and encryption.

Key Features

• 1FUSE file system that stores data on object storage backends (S3, GCS, Rackspace)
• 2Full POSIX semantics including hard links, symlinks, and extended attributes
• 3AES-256 encryption of all data before uploading to the backend
• 4Local metadata cache for fast file system operations
• 5Deduplication reduces storage costs for redundant data

How Python Data Engineers Use S3QL

Python data engineers use S3QL to mount cloud object storage as an encrypted local file system — writing pipeline output files to a mounted S3QL volume using standard Python file I/O (`open()`, `write()`) without any cloud SDK code. S3QL's encryption-at-rest is useful for storing sensitive pipeline outputs in cloud storage with a stronger encryption posture than default S3 SSE.