Cloud Integration

PX relies on commodity cloud primitives that are available across all major cloud providers. The core building blocks are simple: cloud VMs and object storage.

Supported Cloud Providers

PX uses standard cloud infrastructure:

Provider	Compute	Storage	Status
Google Cloud	GCE (VMs)	GCS - gs://...	Available
Amazon	EC2 (VMs)	S3 - s3://...	Available
Microsoft	Azure VMs	Azure Blob Storage	coming soon
DigitalOcean	Droplets (VMs)	Spaces	coming soon

What about microVMs, Sandboxes, Containers, and Kubernetes?

Today, PX runs on cloud VMs, giving you access to the full range of cloud hardware and arbitrary Linux runtime requirements. Future PX releases may add support for microVMs, sandboxes, containers, and Kubernetes, while preserving the same PX programming model and developer experience.

To get PX access to your cloud, see Cloud Setup.

How Cloud Storage Works

PX mounts your object storage as a local filesystem on every VM. This means your code can access cloud storage using standard file operations — no SDK required.

You declare mounts in your px.yaml under file_mounts:, with a remote mount path on the VM and a bucket source. For the full schema, see the px.yaml reference. For a tutorial walkthrough, see Quick Start, Step 4.

FUSE Mounts

PX uses FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) to mount object storage:

• GCP: gcsfuse
• AWS: goofys
• Azure: blobfuse2 (coming soon)
• DigitalOcean: goofys via S3 API (coming soon)

Your code running on VMs is unaware of the blob storage details — all files are accessed via standard Linux filesystem operations.

Setting Up Your Data

Push your data to a bucket with your cloud's native CLI, or use rclone if you want one tool across clouds:

GCS

# gcloud CLI:
gsutil rsync -r data/ gs://my-bucket/data/

# or rclone (a configured GCS remote named "gcs"):
rclone sync data/ gcs:my-bucket/data/

S3

# AWS CLI:
aws s3 sync data/ s3://my-bucket/data/

# or rclone (a configured S3 remote named "s3"):
rclone sync data/ s3:my-bucket/data/

rclone supports AWS, GCP, Azure natively, and DigitalOcean via the S3 backend (since DO Spaces is S3 API-compatible).

Why This Approach Works

Modern object storage offers:

• Access speeds comparable to high-performance NAS
• Strong consistency and durability guarantees
• Commodity pricing
• Cross-region availability

Combined with FUSE mounts, this creates a simple programming model: write code that reads and writes files, and PX handles the distributed infrastructure.