> Now that we often have 1TB+ of storage locally on a laptop workstation (compare to the 100MB default of an early SPARCstation), I don't currently need NFS for anything.
While diskless (or very limited disk) workstations were one use case for NFS, that was far from the primary one.
The main use case was to have a massive shared filesystem across the team, or division, or even whole company (as we did at Sun). You wouldn't want to be duplicating these files locally no matter how much local disk, the point was to have the files be shared amongst everyone for collaboration.
NFS was truly awesome, it is sad that everything these days is subpar. We use weak substitutes like having files on shared google drives, but that is so much inferior to having the files of the entire company mounted on the local filesystem through NFS.
(Using the past tense, since it's not used so much anymore, but my home fileserver exports directories over NFS which I mount on all other machines and laptops at home, so very much using it today, personally.)
Other things that changed were the Web, and the popularity of Git.
For example, one of the big uses of NFS we had was for engineering documents, all of which could be accessed from FrameMaker or Interleaf running on your workstation. Nowaways, all the engineering documentation and more would be accessed through a Web browser from a non-NFS server, and no longer on a shared filesystem.
Another use of NFS we had was for collaborating on shared code by some projects, with SCM storing to NFS servers (other projects used DSEE and ClearCase). But nowaways almost everyone in industry uses distributed Git, syncing to non-NFS servers, with cached copies on their local storage.
I suppose a third thing that changed was CSCW distributed change syncing becoming popular at moving into other tools, such as a live "shared whiteboard" document editing that people can access in their Web browsers. I have mixed feelings about some of the implementations and how they're deployed, but it's pretty wild to have 4 remote people during Covid editing a document in real time at once, and NFS isn't helping with the hard part of that.
Right now, the use case for NFS that first comes to mind is individual humans working with huge files (e.g., for AI training, or other big data), where you want the convenience of being able to access them with any tool from your workstation, and maybe also have big compute servers working with them, without copying things around. You could sorta do these things with big complicated MLops infrastructure, but sometimes that slows you down more than it speeds you up.
Interesting. I self-host Forgejo or GitLab, with SSH or HTTPS access from workstations' local repos, to the "origin" Git server.
The advantage you find to NFS for this is that you share workspaces between the client machines? Or reduce the local storage requirements on the client machines?
Mainly so I don't need to run any source control server, it's all just files.
Same for mercurial. Most of my internal use repositories are mercurial since it's so much more pleasant to use than git and for my hobby time I want pleasant tools that don't hate me. But I digress..
It's the model I've used since the 90s in the days of teamware at Sun.
While diskless (or very limited disk) workstations were one use case for NFS, that was far from the primary one.
The main use case was to have a massive shared filesystem across the team, or division, or even whole company (as we did at Sun). You wouldn't want to be duplicating these files locally no matter how much local disk, the point was to have the files be shared amongst everyone for collaboration.
NFS was truly awesome, it is sad that everything these days is subpar. We use weak substitutes like having files on shared google drives, but that is so much inferior to having the files of the entire company mounted on the local filesystem through NFS.
(Using the past tense, since it's not used so much anymore, but my home fileserver exports directories over NFS which I mount on all other machines and laptops at home, so very much using it today, personally.)