Background

These days, developers In digital pathology frequently use OpenSlide to read whole slide images (WSIs). Since WSIs are typically large, transferring and sharing them can be challenging. Cloud storage provides a scalable, durable, and secure solution for storing and sharing WSIs remotely. By mounting cloud storage as a local file system, existing tools can access WSIs without additional modifications.

AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) and MinIO (S3 compliant, onsite and open-source) are a widely used, robust, and highly scalable cloud storage service. While Mountpoint for AWS S3 is a promising option for treating cloud storage as a local file system, several open-source projects also allow users to mount an S3 bucket as a local file system. Among the most well-known are s3fs and Goofys. In this post, we’ll compare the performance of these two popular open-source solutions.