Support for cloud storage

fastdup supports two types of cloud storage:

Amazon AWS S3 using awscli
Min.io cloud storage API

Amazon s3 aws cli support

Preliminaries:

Install aws cli using the command
sudo apt install awscli
Configure your aws using the command
aws configure
Make sure you can access your bucket using
aws s3 ls s3://<your bucket name>

How to run

There are two options to run:

In the input_dir command line argument put the full path your bucket for example: s3://mybucket/myfolder/myother_folder/
This option is useful for testing but it is not recommended for large corpouses of images as listing files in s3 is a slow operation. In this mode, all the images in the recursive subfolders of the given folders will be used.
Alternatively (and recommended) create a file with the list of all your images in the following format:

s3://mybucket/myfolder/myother_folder/image1.jpg
s3://mybucket/myfolder2/myother_folder4/image2.jpg
s3://mybucket/myfolder3/myother_folder5/image3.jpg

Assuming the filename is files.txt you can run with input_dir=’/path/to/files.txt’

Using AWS endpoints

fastdup supports the use of an AWS endpoint for accessing data stored on S3, i.e., S3 access done using the following command:

aws --endpoint=http://x.x.x.x:x s3 ls --recursive s3://mybucket/

To enable it in fastdup, set the FASTDUP_S3_ENDPOINT_URL environment variable to the endpoint's IP address, by either:

export FASTDUP_S3_ENDPOINT_URL=https://path.to.your.endpoint

Or by prefixing the run command with the variable, e.g.:

FASTDUP_S3_ENDPOINT_URL=https://path.to.your.endpoint python3.8 <Command>

Notes:

Currently we support a single cloud provider and a single bucket.
It is OK to have images with the same name assuming they are nested in different subfolders.

In terms of performance, it is better to copy the full bucket to the local node first in case the local disk is hard enough. Then give the input_dir as the local folder location of the copied data. The explanation above is for the case the dataset is larger than the local disk (and potentially multiple nodes run in parallel).

Min.io support

Preliminaries

Install the min.io client using the command

wget https://dl.min.io/client/mc/release/linux-amd64/mc
sudo mv mc /usr/bin/
chmod +x /usr/bin/mc

Configure the client to point to the cloud provider

mc alias set myminio/ http://MINIO-SERVER MYUSER MYPASSWORD

For example for google cloud:

/usr/bin/mc alias set google  https://storage.googleapis.com/ <access_key> <secret_key>

Make sure the bucket is accessible using the command:

/usr/bin/mc ls google/mybucket/myfolder/myotherfolder/

How to run

There are two options to run:

In the input_dir command line argument put the full path your cloud storage provider as defined by the minio alias, for example: minio://google/mybucket/myfolder/myother_folder/
(Note that google is the alias set for google cloud, and the path has to start with minio:// prefix).
This option is useful for testing but it is not recommended for large corpouses of images as listing files in s3 is a slow operation. In this mode, all the images in the recursive subfolders of the given folders will be used.
Alternatively (and recommended) create a file with the list of all your images in the following format:

minio://google/mybucket/myfolder/myother_folder/image1.jpg
minio://google/mybucket/myfolder/myother_folder/image2.jpg
minio://google/mybucket/myfolder/myother_folder/image3.jpg

Assuming the filename is files.txt you can run with input_dir=’/path/to/files.txt’