AWS S3 Files Costs 13x More Than You Think. Here's the Math.
AWS just shipped the biggest update to S3 in the last five years — Amazon S3 Files. It turns any S3 bucket into a real POSIX-compliant NFS mount with ~1ms latency for active data.
In this video, I break down:
The 128 KB threshold that makes the whole system work
How EFS cache sits between your compute and S3
The pricing reality (13x more expensive than S3 Standard)
Who wins: ML pipelines, RAG ingestion, Lambda, data lakes
Who loses: databases, write-heavy, streaming video
How I'm thinking about it for my own RAG pipeline
What you'll learn:
How S3 Files actually works under the hood
When to use it vs. stay on EBS
The cost math you need before mounting
Architecture decisions that matter for your workload
Who this is for:
Cloud architects evaluating S3 Files
ML/AI engineers running data pipelines on AWS
Backend engineers dealing with small-file overhead on S3
Anyone who's had a mounted S3 bucket "slowly eat their weekend"
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