Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Elastic File System

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 217 posts

Re: Amazon Elastic File System

#91

Post by SEJeff »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #50
alrs wrote: post #47

This is what should have existed instead of EBS all along. I'll never consider this to be as reliable as S3, but if I'm going to have a network filesystem I'd rather be dealing with NFS as my abstraction instead of virtualized network block devices.

May I ask why? My experience with NFS is pretty bad performance wise.

That very much depends on what you're using and how you tune things. With NFSv4.1, you can use parallel nfs, which is essentially striping reads and writes over multiple nfs servers.

http://www.pnfs.com/

If you're using modern servers and clients, it is as fast as you can imagine a cluster of ssd nfs servers to be.

Re: Amazon Elastic File System

#92

Post by mallipeddi »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #78
azinman2 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya. I'm wondering how you'd back say a PostgreSQL instance over nfs? It is just different needs that require different solutions.

Is anyone suggesting that? It is widely considered best practice to back your databases by SSDs.

Well he's pointing out EFS is not a replacement for EBS. You can run postgres on EBS volumes with PIOPS.

Re: Amazon Elastic File System

#93

Post by e40 »

DenisM wrote: post #66

Salient points: - NFS (v4). - Supports petabyte-scale file systems, thousands of concurrent NFS connections. - Automatically grows/shrinks in size. - Multi-zone storage and access. - $0.30 / (Gigabyte * month). - (Not mentioned) Both Linux and Windows have built-in NFS clients.

For comparison, EBS is $0.10 / GB / Month for SSDs and $0.05 / GB / Month for regular disks.

Re: Amazon Elastic File System

#94

Post by vially »

rjurney wrote: post #82

Amazon is the only company other than Apple that consistently thought leads and innovates ahead of other companies and open source.

Would you mind explaining how exactly "Apple consistently leads and innovates ahead of other companies and open source"?

Re: Amazon Elastic File System

#95

Post by kilburn »

Titanous wrote: post #61
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's enticing, are there any references/benchmarks to back it up?

The protocol itself is much cleaner, but I'm not aware of any recent benchmarks. Compare https://ericvh.github.io/9p-rfc/rfc9p2000.html vs https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5661

TODO: conduct this comparison when 9p specification is not full of "TODOs"...

Re: Amazon Elastic File System

#97

Post by netcraft »

nkozyra wrote: post #46
netcraft wrote: post #4

We have been needing this very thing for hosting a large number of assets across multiple ec2 instances. Hope they roll this out quickly.

For the record, there has never been anything stopping you from spinning up an NFS EC2 that all of your other EC2s can use.

This may be a problem for this new service as well, but with windows isn't there a problem getting a network drive to mount without a user physically logging into the machine?

Re: Amazon Elastic File System

#99

Post by acdha »

evol262 wrote: post #64
acdha wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the Linux NFS client made some big improvements in stability by the mid-2000s. FreeBSD took longer but I've heard they've fixed the kernel deadlocks as well. The other interesting note is that they apparently only support NFSv4, which has some welcome improvements: it uses TCP over a single port, avoids the entire portmap/statd/lockd train-wreck, UTF-8 everywhere, etc. One of the more interesting ones is tha…

It's almost certainly NFSv4 only so they can utilize pNFS

I'd be surprised if that didn't factor into the equation, although even just regular referrals would be acceptable for many uses where you can do some degree of load-balancing / fail-over with reasonable recovery times.
Post reply on HN