bug#21954: physical versus virtual disks

This is an ongoing chat between a systems administrator and a applications developer:

It is in regards to what is an Amazon S3 'bucket' and how looks like a hard drive in the cloud.

As the admin I think that it existence does not give a S3 bucket every attribute of a real physical hard drive.

So if I ran the parted command or any other GPT aware utility against the dev files the point to a connected S3 bucket and tried to create a GUID partition table (GPT) and tried to preserve that configuration across the restarting of virtual instances that there would be no guarantees of it persistence.

Thoughts?

Where in a virtual disk is the structures that store MBR, GPT, Inode structures and reserve areas for bad block data that is contained on a real physical hard drive?

regards,

David