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NFS can be the right solution, depending on the problem. Storage backend for serving live images to users? Probably not. Taking uploaded images and storing a co

NFS can be the right solution, depending on the problem. Storage backend for serving live images to users? Probably not. Taking uploaded images and storing a copy (after processing), maybe. Depends on the amount of IOPS you expect to need to throw at those copies. I haven't seen any posts from Etsy on their normal image pipeline, so it's hard to say. It sounds like this was a one-time conversion. Their live image serving is on Akamai, but nothing says they're back-ending the origin servers on NFS. I have to imagine with the amount of ops talent at Etsy, they're not using NFS because they're too dumb to know about a better option. I'm guessing John Allspaw knows a thing or two about how to serve images at high volume.

dmourati 13y ago
The thought that Etsy had good ops people was what lead to my surprise in relying on NFS for anything of the sort. Two mitigating facts: one, this article is from 2010, two, this may have been a one-time thing. Still, surprised and dismayed that they would let NFS into production.
- code_duck 13y ago
  Etsy grew quite quickly, after having been founded by people with little experience running a website at scale. Once an experienced and competent team came on board, I believe they spent a lot of effort recovering from poor decisions made by inexperienced people under duress.