Coming from an academia HPC background and then moving into the private sector, I’ve mostly come to believe that parallel filesystems (especially POSIX-compliant ones) are rarely the right solution outside of MPI simulations. Like NFS, it makes it extremely easy and attractive to implement anti-patterns like using the filesystem for IPC or generating a bazillion files and then needing to reduce them to move to the next stage of the pipeline. In my experience, it’s rare that people don’t regret doing that sort of stuff in the long run.
That said, I’m sure the AWS team knows their customers and what they’re doing better than I do!
