NFS: the early years

I think it gets worse, because all filesystems are secretly network filesystems. It doesn't really matter that much whether the two computers speak to each other over ethernet, SCSI or PCIe, you just notice it less with lower latency. Basing persistent state storage on what amounts to a shared, globally read-writable single address space without any transaction or really, any well defined concurrency semantics is, I think, a fundamental dead end. See also the symlink discussion. So much effort is thrown into pretending files work like they did on a pdp11 at a very deep level, and I think it's really something that needs to be moved beyond. Git is actually a pretty good example I never thought of there, in the way it sort of emulates a traditional filesystem structure on top of a content-addressed key-value blob store.

We have ~400 Linux systems ranging from workstations to really big compute servers using a global namespace supported by autofs and nfs for /home and all places where our scientific data goes (/project). We even have software packages installed and used over nfs ( /pkg ) because, to make our data processing reproducible, we keep every version of every library or framework and that would be too much to keep on every system. Only base Linux system, copies of the current/default version of some highly used packages (e.g. python) and some scratch space are on local disks.

We have ~500 active users and they usually don't complain about perfomance or responsiveness of their desktop.

We do this for decades and it used to be a pain, but with the progress of NFS and the steps we've taken here (e.g. replace NIS), everything runs really smoothly these days! If it doesn't, some user acted against the rules (e.g. hammering a fileserver from many distributed cluster jobs or trying to up- or download a few terrabytes without a speed limit) and we have a talk.

Oh, and the same namespace ( /home, /project ) is accessed over CIFS by our Windows and macOS workstation. Plus the files are accessed locally on the fileservers, too. For example, we typically would put daemons and cronjobs, which don't need much ram or cpu, on the fileserver where their projects are local, to reduce network dependency. Also users are allowed to log in to the HPC node where their job is executing to monitor or debug its behavior.

And (related to other discussions) we couldn't live without symlinks. And all these systems are multi-user, security border between users is basic requirement.

NFS, symlinks and multiuser are not dead, "Nowadays things are done like this and that" might be true in a statistical sense but should not be generalized.