FSaaS: Configuring Policies for Managing Shared Files Among Cooperating, Distributed Applications

Related Work

There are a lot of studies dealing with the file sharing in distributed systems.

Network File System (NFS) (Sandberg, 1986) is a way to share files among machines on a network as if they were located in the client’s local hard drive. The main idea of NFS is that each file server provides a standard view of its file system. The NFS protocol allows clients (which are heterogeneous processes) to access files on a remote server, in order to share a common file system. NFS uses a remote access model where the client asks to the file server (through a common API) for executing some operations on a set of files. It is different from the upload/download model, where the client first downloads the affected file, then modifies and uploads it on file server. The main advantages of NFS are transparency on access and good failure robustness, but there is no migration transparency. If a resource is placed in other server, the client must be aware of this change. Moreover, NFS has a very low availability and poor scalability since it is based on a single server model, even if there are multiple servers (each one runs independently).