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Basically, GlusterFS is trying to solve a hard problem: make distributed/remote filesystem to feel like a local filesystem for applications built on top of it.

Basically, GlusterFS is trying to solve a hard problem: make distributed/remote filesystem to feel like a local filesystem for applications built on top of it. For the client, you can choose from NFS, SMB or its homemake fuse client, which makes the remote system accessible as if everything is on local file system. I used to build similar systems in house and find it extremely painful to design and maintain, we did lots of custom hacks to make our system to suit our need. GlusterFS, as a general solution, won't have that much flexibility and may or may not suit your custom needs. Overall, I feel AWS S3 is a better (or at least simpler) approach. Just acknowledge that files are not locally stored and use them as is. AWS is experimenting EFS as well, which we found not as desirable as well. Edit: I am not saying that you cannot make GlusterFS or EFS perform great. My appoint it that it's hard to do so, and might not worth the effort to develop such a system given that S3 can serve most needs of distributed file storage.

k_bx 11y ago
There's Riak S2, which can give you S3-compatible API but still run on your hardware with your configs.
spydum 11y ago
aren't you comparing apples to oranges? S3 is an object store (and non POSIX.. Also only eventually consistent).. GlusterFS is neither of those. They simply solve different problem spaces
- ej_campbell 11y ago
  Parent is saying that it might be simpler for many applications to forgo the need for a file system abstraction and just use S3's more limited API directly. That way, you don't get bit by thorny edge cases like "ls" of 10K files taking orders of magnitude more time than you'd expect give you're used to the speed of a local disk.