Difference between s3n s3a and s3

Question

I am more concerned about the technical differences:

Can someone brief me on letter change as well?

Answer 1

Start by referring this link. This will give insight on above mentioned terms : https://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/AmazonS3

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/emr-file-system-s3/

When you change the letter on the URI scheme, it will make a big difference because it causes different software to be used to interface to S3.

This is the difference between the three:

 s3 is a block-based overlay on top of Amazon S3,whereas  s3n/s3a are not. These are are object-based.

 s3n supports objects up to 5GB when size is the concern, while s3a supports objects up to 5TB and has higher performance.Note that  s3a is the successor to s3n.

I hope this helps

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Answer 2

- s3n is for use with files that are natively stored in S3 as individual S3 objects
- s3 is for use for accessing files that are stored within HDFS blocks and those blocks themselves are stored or backed in S3

Answer 3

S3 Native FileSystem (URI scheme: s3n) A native filesystem for reading and writing regular files on S3. The advantage of this filesystem is that you can access files on S3 that were written with other tools. Conversely, other tools can access files written using Hadoop. The disadvantage is the 5GB limit on file size imposed by S3.

S3A (URI scheme: s3a) A successor to the S3 Native, s3n fs, the S3a: system uses Amazon's libraries to interact with S3. This allows S3a to support larger files (no more 5GB limit), higher performance operations and more. The filesystem is intended to be a replacement for/successor to S3 Native: all objects accessible from s3n:// URLs should also be accessible from s3a simply by replacing the URL schema.

S3 Block FileSystem (URI scheme: s3) A block-based filesystem backed by S3. Files are stored as blocks, just like they are in HDFS. This permits efficient implementation of renames. This filesystem requires you to dedicate a bucket for the filesystem - you should not use an existing bucket containing files, or write other files to the same bucket. The files stored by this filesystem can be larger than 5GB, but they are not interoperable with other S3 tools.

Answer 4

S3N and S3A are both connectors to S3, with S3A the successor built using Amazon's own AWS SDK.

Answer 5

If you are using Hadoop 2.7 or later, use s3a. 

If you are using Hadoop 2.5 or earlier use s3n.

They are both just tools to connect to S3.

Answer 6

S3n is a native filesystem for reading and writing regular files on S3. and S3a is just the successor of S3n

Answer 7

You can read the brief about it in the below documentation from amazon

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/ManagementGuide/emr-plan-file-systems.html

Answer 8

- s3n is for use with files that are natively stored in S3 as individual S3 objects and s3a is a successor of s3n
- s3 is for use for accessing files that are stored within HDFS block.

Answer 9

A native filesystem for reading and writing regular files on S3. S3N allows Hadoop to access files on S3 that were written with other tools, and conversely, other tools can access files written to S3N using Hadoop. S3N is stable and widely used, but it is not being updated with any new features. S3N requires a suitable version of the jets3t JAR on the classpath.

S3A is the successor of S3N.

Answer 10

In laymans terms in hadoop

Apache Hadoop implementation of block based file system backed by S3, which is a storage service by AWS.

S3N is a native file system for reading files from S3.

S3A is the upper version of S3N.