File Storage vs Object Storage: How to Choose the Right One at Scale
Engineers often default to file storage for user uploads, but this approach struggles beyond millions of files due to inode exhaustion and metadata performance limits. Object storage, such as Amazon S3, uses a flat key namespace with an HTTP REST API and supports billions of objects without performance degradation. File storage is best suited for workloads requiring POSIX semantics, such as databases, OS files, and NFS shares that depend on in-place edits, file locking, and sub-millisecond I/O. Object storage excels for unstructured data at scale, including user uploads, backups, data lakes, and machine learning datasets, offering rich metadata and a simple HTTP interface. Most production stacks use both paradigms side by side, selecting each based on the specific access patterns and scalability needs of the workload.
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