S3 API

Alluxio provides an S3-compatible REST API that allows applications built for Amazon S3 to interact with data managed by Alluxio without code changes. Depending on your workload, Alluxio supports two deployment modes:

Deployment Modes

	Standard Mode (Read Cache)	Write Cache Mode
Use case	Accelerate reads from remote object storage	Low-latency writes with async persistence
FoundationDB	Not required	Required
Write policies	WRITE_THROUGH	WRITE_THROUGH, WRITE_BACK, TRANSIENT
Deployment complexity	Low	Medium — requires FDB cluster and path-level policy configuration
Typical workloads	AI model loading, data analytics, S3-based reads	Training checkpoints, ETL pipelines, hybrid-cloud write buffering

Getting Started

All users should start with Setup & Configuration, which covers:

• Enabling the S3 API endpoint

• Authentication and addressing style

• Load balancer setup

• HTTP redirect behavior and client compatibility

• Supported S3 actions and limitations

If your workload requires write caching, continue to Write Cache after completing the base setup. This adds:

• FoundationDB deployment

• Write policy configuration (per-path)

• Async persistence, eviction, and capacity management