Colin Percival, creator of the backup service Tarsnap, has published Route 53 Files, a file system that connects any AWS compute resource to Amazon's Route 53 DNS service. The project lives at daemonology.net/r53fs and, remarkably, actually works.

The launch is satire with a target. AWS shipped S3 Files in April, a file system layer over Simple Storage Service. Percival's reaction, in his own words, was: "Oh, we're shipping category errors now? Hold my beer." His launch post deliberately mimics AWS's S3 Files announcement, right down to pitching Route 53 Files as ideal for AI agents collaborating through file-based tools and on-call engineers reverting each other's changes with sed.

The framing also nods to Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at Duckbill, who has spent the better part of a decade calling Route 53 a database, mostly to annoy people who know what a database is. Quinn praised the project, saying Percival replaced an awful API with echo, a downgrade in every respect except that it works without six weeks of cloud school.

Percival's critique of S3 Files is serious underneath the joke. He points to two sharp edges: the design syncs changes back to S3 only after 60 seconds of inactivity, which breaks when a file is continuously updated, and the IAM integration, weakened by the IMDS security model, gives less privilege separation than users expect from a filesystem. He says he knows of no one running S3 Files in production and doubts customers understand the edge cases.