What happened to NFS?

1 point

12 years ago

Back in the ye old days (~7 years ago) I was a co-founder of a small startup. Services like S3 and GitHub weren't commonplace, so one of the first things we did was buy a machine and install NFS on it. This was then our canonical repository for code and home directories. We found this to be very useful: pretty much everything was on the shared file system so accessing code, smallish (<1 TB) data files and executables was easy. The convenience of having files be instantly available and accessible from any program also really helped productivity.

Fast forward to today: many of my friends are involved with startups, and what I find surprising is that none of them use a shared file system: they get by with Dropbox and S3, but neither of these are really equivalent, and have their own annoying overheads. Sometimes this is unavoidable (say, if I don't have an office), but I'm curious if there are other reasons. Is it the (non-trivial) overhead of getting such a system going? Wanting access to the data in production? Do people consider using services like Amazon's Storage Gateway (https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/)?

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