Saturday, April 18, 2026·2 min read

Introducing Training Pipes: S3-Compatible Storage with NFS & SMB

Training Pipes Team
Server infrastructure representing cloud storage

Today we're excited to introduce Training Pipes — a multi-protocol cloud storage platform that lets you mount any S3-compatible object storage over NFSv4 or SMB, while keeping full S3 API access.

Why We Built This

AI and ML teams spend an enormous amount of time fighting their storage stack. You've got data in S3, but your training framework expects a filesystem. You end up with clunky workarounds: mounting EFS separately, running s3fs in production (please don't), or copying terabytes of data before every run.

Training Pipes solves this cleanly. Bring your own bucket — from AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob, Cloudflare R2, Wasabi, or any S3-compatible provider — and we give you:

  • NFSv4.0 and NFSv4.1 file system access
  • SMB / CIFS for Windows and cross-platform workflows
  • Full S3-compatible REST APIs alongside the file protocols
  • Regional caching gateways so hot data stays fast near your compute

How It Works

Connect your existing bucket in under five minutes. Training Pipes creates a gateway that translates file system operations into S3 API calls transparently. Your training jobs mount the NFS share and see your data as a local filesystem. No data migration required.

# Mount your Training Pipes NFS share
mount -t nfs4 your-gateway.trainingpipes.com:/your-bucket /mnt/training-data

Your ML framework doesn't know or care that the files live in S3. It just reads and writes to the mount point at full speed.

Built for AI Workloads

We designed Training Pipes specifically for the patterns we see in AI training:

  • Large sequential reads — model checkpoints, dataset shards
  • Parallel access — many GPU nodes reading the same data simultaneously
  • Mixed protocols — preprocessing on Linux over NFS, monitoring dashboards on Windows over SMB

Our regional caching layer keeps frequently-accessed files close to your compute, cutting egress costs and latency on repeated reads.

Get Started for Free

Training Pipes has a free tier that's genuinely useful. Sign up, connect your bucket, and have your first NFS mount running in minutes.

We're launching with support for AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, and any S3-compatible endpoint. More providers coming soon.

Start for free →