Cloud Parts

File storage

A shared network drive that many servers mount at once.

5 technologies on this page ↓
Live model
What you’re watchingThree render nodes read from and write to one shared filesystem at the same time, and all of them see the same files.

How it works

Managed file storage exposes an ordinary folder hierarchy over NFS or SMB. Many machines can mount the same share and read and write the same files at the same time, with normal permissions and locking. Capacity grows as you add data. It’s slower than a local disk, and far easier than syncing files between servers.

Think of it as

The shared drive at the office. Everyone sees the same folders and can open the same spreadsheet.

Reach for it when

  • Legacy apps that expect a shared directory
  • Content management systems, home directories, shared ML datasets
  • Several containers that need the same files

Think twice when

A real example

A render farm of 40 servers mounts /mnt/shared. Every node reads the same scene files and writes its finished frames back into one folder.

Technologies

Specific products, and what each does differently.

What each provider calls it

AWS
EFS, FSx, S3 Files (a file system over an S3 bucket)
Google Cloud
Filestore
Azure
Azure Files, NetApp Files
Open source & others
NFS, CephFS, GlusterFS; HDFS (Hadoop’s file system for big data jobs, not POSIX)

In code · bash

# Every server runs the same mount
sudo mount -t nfs4 -o nfsvers=4.1 \
  fs-0a1b2c3d.efs.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:/ /mnt/shared

ls /mnt/shared/scenes

Often confused with

Block storageObject storageObject, block or file storage?
Where it came from1983–2026

Shared file storage grew up with office networks in the early 1980s. In 1983 Barry Feigenbaum at IBM designed SMB so PCs running DOS could share files and printers over a network; Microsoft and 3Com later built it into LAN Manager, and it became the way Windows shares folders. In 1984 Sun Microsystems created NFS, so a Unix workstation could mount a directory from a server and use its files as if they were local. Sun published version 2 as RFC 1094 in 1989, aiming for “transparent remote access to shared files across networks” on any machine or operating system.

Then the file server became an appliance. Auspex sold dedicated NFS servers from 1989, and Network Appliance (now NetApp), founded in 1992 by David Hitz, James Lau and Michael Malcolm, built simpler, cheaper file server appliances that came to dominate network-attached storage. NFSv4, published by the IETF in December 2000, built file locking into the protocol and kept that state on the server.

In the cloud, object and block storage came first. Amazon EFS, announced in 2015 and generally available in 2016, offered managed NFS that grows on its own; Azure Files and Google Filestore fill the same role. In 2026 AWS’s S3 Files put an NFS file system in front of object storage.

Why it’s built this way

Remote files that look local
Programs keep using ordinary open, read and write calls, so existing software works on shared files without changes. That is still the main reason to choose file storage.
One protocol for any machine or operating system
NFS was specified as remote procedure calls with a machine-independent data format, designed to be “portable across different machines, operating systems, network architectures, and transport protocols”.
A stateless server, later made stateful
With no record of its clients, an NFSv2 server needed no recovery after a crash: a client “need only retry a request until the server responds”. Locking had to live in a separate protocol until NFSv4 (2000) built it in, with lease-based state kept on the server.

Timeline

  1. 1983

    IBM’s Barry Feigenbaum designs SMB for networked DOS file access

  2. 1984

    Sun Microsystems creates NFS

  3. 1989

    NFS version 2 published as RFC 1094 (March)

  4. 1992

    Network Appliance (NetApp) founded; its file server appliances come to dominate NAS

  5. 2000

    NFSv4 (RFC 3010) builds in file locking, with state kept on the server (December)

  6. 2016

    Amazon EFS brings managed, self-growing NFS to the cloud (June)

  7. 2026

    S3 Files serves an S3 bucket as an NFS file system (April)

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