Here the four options most often discussed when considering NAS/shared disk/storage on AWS:
- S3 : Sometimes NAS isn't the right solution to the problem; it's just something that's relatively easy to implement.
- GlusterFS, Lustre, openAFS : implementation of a distributed filesystem (GlusterFS, Lustre, openAFS, etc). Write performance can be below writing to EBS.
- S3-back 'filesystem' : Use a S3-backed "filesystem" (such as s3fs or Danilo's yas3fs), which is definitely easier to implement. However, write performance could become an issue.
- NFS : You could just run NFS on another EC2 instances. However, this will not provide the fault tolerance and scalability that is built into a solution such as GlusterFS, or a solution such a Zadara. With Zadara you can have a central repository/shared file system in a NFS mount that will be accesible from EC2 machines. You can mount Zadara from EC2 via NFS or iSCSI.
- Of course, when you are running an Oracle database you will probably not use one of these options. This would be like putting your on premise Oracle database storage on NFS.
