[athrun]

You're right, but I would reframe it along the lines of Network filesystems (like NFS or OCFS3) vs. Distributed Object Storage (S3). In that sense, certainly, the current "default" is to use the latter and avoid the former.

Local filesystems and/or volume managers won't go away anytime soon. Internally, a system like S3 needs a unified access to the storage, which is provided by the filesystem.

I think we are going to see the emergence of new filesystems that are much simpler in design compared to ZFS (as reliability is left to an upper layer in the stack) for use in the Cloud. Somewhat similar to the trend toward lightweight OSes built for the cloud (CoreOS, Project Atomic, etc.). Many features that were in the realm of the operating system are now delegated to upper layers in the stack.