Running a database not designed for S3 on an S3-backed file system is a hack that gets you some benefits but misses the best parts. A few points: 1. An S3 native system allows you to run things like compaction and GC on a separate machine. Most databases that couple storage and compute don't, meaning your compaction and query execution thrash the same CPU. 2. If you don't design for explicit read-only replicas, you can't just spin up another replica and read the same data safely. Traditional systems often use the filesystem for locking and assume exclusive access, so a second instance can interfere with the active writer. 3. Caching will not be as efficient. A big part of making object native systems performant is caching with the explicit knowledge that cold misses are an order of magnitude more expensive. You could mirror everything to NVMe, but that defeats a lot of the cost benefits and predictable latency behaviors of object storage. This is just the start of the list, but it feels very similar to trying to put a database on NFS and assuming your distsys problems are all solved.