This is accurate! A lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to build a good file system abstraction on cheap, S3 storage. However, Regatta differs from these solutions in two important ways. First, Regatta is a shared, durable caching layer that sits between your instances and S3. This means that Regatta is able to efficiently perform operations (like directory renames) and provide strong consistency to other file system clients (whereas s3fs and other FUSE file systems would need to actually perform those operations in S3 for other clients to see the output). Secondly, Regatta is designed to support all file system operations. This means that you can do file locking, random writes, appends, and renames -- even when they aren't efficient to perform on S3.