S3 Filesystem

The geodesic base image ships with a number of utility scripts:

• /usr/local/bin/s3 - makes it easier to manage S3 filesystems in /etc/fstab
• /usr/local/bin/s3fs - a thin wrapper around goofys for mounting S3 filesystems with a local cache in /dev/shm. It’s the command executed by mount (e.g. the s3fs#/... part in /etc/fstab)

Use-cases

A few common use-cases have arrisen for mounting S3 buckets inside of the geodesic shell.

1. Master SSH Keys. When using terraform-aws-key-pair to generate a set of SSH keys, those keys need to be securely stored somewhere. A private, versioned, encrypted S3 bucket is as good a place as any. The terraform-aws-tfstate-backend provide a bucket suitable for this purpose.
2. Manipulating Terraform State. Sometimes we move projects around and need to rename state folders. It’s easy to change directory to the S3 bucket and move files around. Othertimes, in extreme cases we’ve needed to edit the .tfstate file. Being able to do this using jq is nice.
3. Storing Helmfile Values. When deploying charts with helm or helmfile, you may need a large values.yaml file for a particular service. Othertimes, that values.yaml may contain sensitive values like TLS private keys. Storing that file in an encrypted S3 bucket works well.

Configuring S3 Bucket Mount Points

Add the following to your Dockerfile to make it easy to mount S3 buckets inside of a geodesic shell.

# Filesystem entry for tfstate
RUN s3 fstab '${TF_BUCKET}' '/' '/secrets/tf'

This calls the s3 wrapper command to append an fstab entry to /etc/fstab.

For refernce only, here’s what that fstab entry looks like:

s3fs#${TF_BUCKET} /secrets/tf fuse _netdev,allow_other,rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions 0 0

Mounting Buckets

To mount buckets, just run mount -a after having assumed roles. This is the same as calling s3 mount.