
Google Acquires Elastifile - bjoko
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/expanding-our-enterprise-file-storage-offerings-to-simplify-the-management-and-scaling-of-data
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strin
Looks like Elastifile allows users to "mount" cloud buckets to their servers
as NFS. This allows them to run old desktop workflows without the need to
migrate these workflows to the cloud.

The upside is that Google Cloud is getting serious about the enterprise
because most of them still use desktop applications.

The question is how long this will last since the future is the cloud.

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choppaface
It will be interesting to see how well this scales. I have seen AWS EFS fall
over under heavy read load (lots of reads for the same TB-scale data). A lot
of poor souls using Horovod with no data team use EFS to “distribute” data in
data-parallel SGD.

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spydum
EFS generally only falls down when you hit your IOPs limit for the measurement
period -have seen this soooo many times. Buy more storage/IOPS, and monitor
that puppy.

~~~
hobofan
IOPs is one of the main pitfalls of cloud platforms and I'm baffled that
neither GCP nor AWS make it easier to detect that you are hitting a limit
there.

I've had multiple gigs where I was tasked with solving performance pitfalls,
and most of the time it was as simple as upping the IOPS. In one case even
though the problem was resolved in the end, the client migrated away from the
cloud again because of that bad experience.

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truth_seeker
I would be interested to see how it compares with AWS EFS under a variety of
load.

AWS EFS implements NFS 4.1 which support has support for massive parallel IO.

[http://www.pnfs.com/](http://www.pnfs.com/)

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geerlingguy
I guess this will be the Google Cloud equivalent of Amazon’s EFS?

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p_l
There's already GCP Filestore.

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sciurus
Filestore is basically a single google-managed instance running NFS. It's much
less sophisticated and resilient than EFS, but also can be much faster since
it doesn't have the overhead of a distributed system. Don't try running
something that touches lots of files like mercurial on EFS, trust me...

The article says Elastifile (which I know nothing about) will become part of
filestore.

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dogismycopilot
Filestore is also really expensive for what is basically just NFS.

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ethbro
Managed services are generally for enterprise, where you're fully costing out
support + security mitigation.

Eliminating team coordination tips the balance.

~~~
geerlingguy
EFS is... surprisingly cheap, as long as you don’t need heavy sustained IO for
more than a few hours at a time. Great for a simple file store and some big
data purposes.

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ppod
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE)

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christi_meyer
Elastic is next

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nodesocket
A disk that can be attached to multiple VM's and support simultaneous
reads/writes is a huge addition to GCP.

~~~
zachberger
Google Cloud Filestore has existed for some time:
[https://cloud.google.com/filestore/](https://cloud.google.com/filestore/)

