Skip to main content

Frequently Asked Questions

This section provides authoritative answers to frequently asked questions regarding Lioran S3 (Lioran Bastion) architecture, benchmarks, licensing, client drivers, and deployment.

What is Lioran S3?​

Lioran S3 is a high-performance single-node object storage server and media engine engineered in Rust. It provides clean bucket and object semantics, bounded-memory streaming I/O, transactional RocksDB metadata persistence, resumable multipart uploads, HMAC-SHA256 signed URLs, video transcoding, and official client SDKs.

Is Lioran S3 the same as Lioran Bastion?​

Yes. Lioran S3 is the developer product name and ecosystem brand, while Lioran Bastion (and the binary bastion-server) represents the underlying storage engine and Rust codebase developed by Lioran Developer Solutions (LDS), an initiative of Lioran Group, founded and led by Swaraj Puppalwar (Founder & CTO).

Is Lioran S3 open source?​

No. Lioran S3 and Lioran Bastion are proprietary software developed and owned by Lioran Developer Solutions under a Proprietary Source Code License (Copyright © 2026 Lioran Developer Solutions. All rights reserved). Access to source code, documentation, or binary packages does not grant an open-source license or ownership rights.

Is Lioran S3 AWS S3 API compatible?​

No. Lioran S3 implements its own modern REST API, native connection protocol (bastion://), official TypeScript driver (@liorans3/driver), and CLI (@liorans3/cli). It is designed to be lean, predictable, and memory-efficient rather than an emulation layer for AWS S3 XML/SigV4 protocol compatibility. An optional lightweight S3-compatible gateway proxy is planned for future releases.

What is the current release status and when is the next release?​

The current release is Lioran S3 V1 Pre-Alpha, officially released on 01 October 2026.

The next planned release has a target milestone of 17 November 2026, focusing on zero-copy socket transfer optimizations (splice/sendfile) and stabilized video packaging pipelines.

What performance has Lioran S3 demonstrated in empirical benchmarks?​

In our official 100.52 GiB soak and chaos benchmark (Run ID: 20260930T111856-d14352):

  • Write Ingestion: Ingested 6,050 objects (100.52 GiB) with 32 concurrent workers at an average throughput of 87.3 MB/s (peak 5s burst of 663.2 MB/s) with 0 unexpected write failures.
  • Crash Recovery: Injected 5 hard SIGKILL process crashes during active streaming writes; the engine recovered cleanly 5 out of 5 times with zero uncommitted orphan artifacts.
  • Read Throughput: Completed 6,050 reads at an average throughput of 281.7 MB/s (peak 414.1 MB/s). (Note: Our target of 500 MB/s was not achieved in this pre-alpha run due to file descriptor contention, and is being addressed in our zero-copy roadmap).
  • Cryptographic Integrity: Audited 188 random samples across all 15 buckets with 0 checksum mismatches, 0 bit rot errors, and 0 missing objects.

All raw benchmark logs are published and downloadable on our Engineering Proof & Benchmarks page.

How does Lioran S3 prevent memory spikes during large file uploads?​

Lioran S3 strictly decouples the metadata plane from the object data plane:

  1. Payloads stream through bounded-size memory buffers (typically 64 KiB–4 MiB) directly between network sockets and disk files, guaranteeing that objects are never buffered entirely in RAM.
  2. Raw payload bytes are never stored inside RocksDB. RocksDB only stores object metadata pointers and SHA-256 checksums.
  3. During the 100.52 GiB soak test under 32 concurrent workers, peak process RSS was bounded to 924.2 MB and settled back to 231.7 MB.

How does write durability and crash consistency work?​

Lioran S3 supports configurable crash durability modes via BASTION_DURABILITY:

  • strict mode: Every write buffer is flushed and synced to disk storage via synchronous fsync (sync_all) calls before metadata is committed and HTTP 200 OK is returned.
  • balanced mode: The engine leverages OS writeback caching for higher throughput scenarios where battery-backed NVMe write caching or host-level resilience is present.

In both modes, writes use an atomic staging-and-promote protocol (.staging/ to objects/) with automatic rollback if the RocksDB transaction fails.

How does authentication and access control work?​

  • Administrative Authentication: Secure session-based authentication using Argon2id password hashing.
  • Programmatic Access Keys: Granular API keys (bk_... / sk_...) with role-based scoping (admin, readwrite, readonly).
  • HMAC-SHA256 Presigned URLs: Time-expiring signed URLs allowing direct browser uploads or downloads without sharing master credentials.

Can I self-host Lioran S3?​

Yes. Lioran S3 is designed as a self-contained, single-node storage server. You can deploy it using Docker Compose (paired with Caddy or Nginx for automatic TLS termination) or run the native compiled binary directly on your Linux, macOS, or Windows servers.

How do I install the CLI and TypeScript Driver?​

  • Command Line Interface (CLI): Install globally via npm: 
    npm install -g @liorans3/cli@prealpha
  • TypeScript / Node.js Driver: Install in any project: 
    npm install @liorans3/driver

How does media processing (video transcoding & thumbnails) work?​

Lioran S3 includes an integrated asynchronous media pipeline (bastion-media):

  • Automatically extracts JPEG/WebP preview thumbnails from uploaded video files.
  • Packages MP4 files into multi-bitrate HLS (.m3u8) and DASH (.mpd) adaptive streaming formats.
  • Issues time-limited signed video share tokens for secure playback in HTML5 video players without exposing raw object keys.

Where can I report bugs, request features, or get support?​

What is the commercial and refund policy?​

Except where required by applicable law, payments made for Lioran S3 commercial products, licenses, services, or subscriptions are non-refundable once payment has been successfully processed. Please review our documentation, evaluation builds, and test benchmarks before making any commercial purchase.