

Autoscaling with Capistrano, NFS and Runit - loopj
https://bugsnag.com/blog/autoscaling-capistrano-nfs-runit

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mbreese
From the article:

> NFS lets you share a directory between multiple servers (think of it as
> Dropbox for servers).

So, ignoring that NFS is nothing like Dropbox, there's nothing wrong _per se_
with using NFS on a cloud setup for shared storage, this setup assumes that
your NFS server will always be up. For anyone who has worked with NFS servers,
you'll know that this isn't always the case. (Who here has lost a day when
your NFS mounted home directory won't load?)

And you don't want to deal with a down NFS server when you're trying to auto-
scale. Somewhere you'll always have a single point of failure, but I've always
tried to make NFS not be it.

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ChrisSlx
NFS is a single point of failure. If something goes wrong on your NFS host,
you'll break your entire cluster. That obvious oversight combined with calling
it "Dropbox for servers" makes me think that whoever designed this doesn't
understand NFS.

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lwhalen
Well hold on with the NFS hate everyone. I worked for a (very large, very
deep-pocketed) web hosting company around 10 years ago, and they used NFS to
deploy their software, configs (this was just before Puppet started getting
popular), and user data. This worked VERY well. Granted, they were running on
some pretty heavy iron (a couple dozen NetApp filers, all clustered 11 ways to
Sunday) to make sure that the NFS facilities stayed up, but If You Know What
You're Doing(tm) and err on the 'fast' and 'good' sides of the 'fast, cheap,
and good - pick two' aphorism, NFS is quite useful.

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mbreese
Exactly - you were working with a well engineered system that could handle
failover. Simply installing an NFS server on an Ubuntu VM isn't going to come
close to the reliability that you'd want for this job.

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panhandlr
Good luck with those stale NFS file handles...

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justizin
"NFS lets you share a directory between multiple servers (think of it as
Dropbox for servers)."

Oy vey. ;)

~~~
panhandlr
More like, "Dropbox is like NFS for desktops"

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mtanski
You're probably better if using Cephfs or Lustre then NFS. Linearly scalable,
no SPOF (single point of failure).

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dpe82
AFS is quite well suited for this use case:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_File_System](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_File_System)

