Choosing between Filestore and Persistent disks

[kumards]

I'm looking for insights/tips around factors to consider when designing storage for a workload being migrated to GCP, specifically the choice between file storage (i.e., Filestore) and block storage (i.e., GCE persistent disks).

One factor could be that if the app reads/writes data from shared file systems, using NFS for example, then Filestore might be a good choice. (The app can be migrated with zero to minimal refactoring.)

What other technical factors would you consider -- performance, scaling? I'd appreciate any thoughts from the community.

Thank you!

[dshah · Accepted solution]

Hi @kumards some other factors you can consider are management overhead (self managed vs fully managed), capacity, performance throughput, scaling,  cost, support for NFSv3, v4, backups, HA, DR, latency, file locks, encryption (at rest, in transit, in-memory), compliance, IAM, network security. There are few limitations when using PDs with multiple instances such as ability to write from only 2 instances simultaneously. You can also consider some 3P solutions such as NetApp Cloud Volumes or Dell EMC along with Elastifile architecture and multitude of Filestore service tiers available within GCP.