If you’ve worked in post production, VFX, or animation over the last decade, you’ve likely heard this one before: Just “Mount S3”, so it can behave like a traditional file system.

On the surface, the idea seems simple—take infinitely scalable object storage and present it as a local drive. No hardware. No traditional NAS. Just the cloud.

While a lot of products claim to do this, in most cases, these solutions are really just thin file system shims. They translate file system actions like “open”, “read”, “write”, and “rename” direction into 1:1 S3 API calls. It’s a straightforward mapping layer and for simple access patterns it tends to work fine.

But when teams want to truly collaborate in the cloud, working creatively in real-time with multiple users in different locations, traditional “S3 Mounts” just can’t keep up.

When “S3 Mounts” Start to Crack

Object storage and file systems have fundamentally different architectures.

S3-compatible object storage is built for durability and scale, and acts more like a passive repository than an active workspace; it’s not designed to handle low-latency, random-access file workloads. A traditional file system, on the other hand, is built and refined to handle all the nitty-gritty calls and changes that happen during active workloads—immediate metadata operations, granular reads and writes, and consistent behavior under heavy parallel access.

When you bolt a “S3 Mount” on top of object storage, you’re asking the storage layer to behave like something it was never designed to be. Under the stress of real creative workloads—think video, VFX, animation, finishing—the cracks start to appear when teams need:

• Random seeks inside massive media files
• Sustained high-bitrate playback
• Concurrent users & tools hitting the same assets
• Constant read/write activity across locations

When these stressors are placed on that “S3 Mount” 1:1 translation layer, it shows its fragility. Performance becomes unpredictable. Caching layers become fragile. Latency spikes. Workflows stall. If you’ve ever tried to work this way, we know you’re familiar with the situation.

Why “S3 Native” Means Something Different

Suite didn’t start by trying to “mount S3.”

Suite started with a cloud-native file system.

Now, we’re bringing our proven expertise in file systems and object storage, and applying file streaming technology to native object storage. With the introduction of S3 Native File Streaming, Suite now reads and writes data as standard objects

The result is the same performance, reliability and feature set users have come to love with Suite, now unlocked for true cloud-native integrations, migration-free deployments, and a universal format that supports workflows of every size, scale, or complexity.

In practice, this means that an existing object storage bucket remains the system of record while other S3-compatible tools continue to operate on the same underlying data.

Under the hood, Suite handles the rest—byte-range streaming, prioritization, concurrency control, consistency across network conditions—so creative tools and users experience predictable file system behavior at every step of a creative workflow.

From a user’s perspective, files behave like they’re local.

From an infrastructure perspective, everything stays the same.

S3 Native File Streaming - Built For Collaboration

With S3 Native File Streaming, Suite becomes the file streaming and access layer that fits seamlessly into existing workflows, regardless of their size or complexity.

Suite can be instantly adopted and added to existing enterprise environments, enabling true, real-time collaboration built directly on any S3-compatible object storage:

• Suite plugs directly into existing pipelines
• Suite co-exists seamlessly with MAMs, DAMs, render farms, automation, and archive
• Suite serves as the active access layer, not a storage replacement

This is the same Suite experience teams have come to love, now deployed directly on top of any S3-compatible object storage. If you’re fed up with “S3 Mounts”, it’s time to give Suite a try.

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Sign up for the S3 Native private beta here.

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