[brianm]

This is cool! At a previous company we got a lot of mileage in debugging and ad-hoc tasks by exposing various things as filesystems. We mostly did webdav, but NFS is way better from a client transparency perspective. For many folks find, ls, and grep very much beat curl and jq.

[q3k]

A nice protocol to do this with is 9p [1]. It's much easier to implement a server for it than for NFS, either from scratch or even with a good library, and it's about just as usable on major operating systems. It has a tiny API and therefore surface area, also making it great for high security applications. It’s probably the closest thing we have to a cross-platform, network transportable FUSE.

Even though it started its life as a component of Plan9, 9p is getting through a renaissance period right now: qemu, WSL, gVisor, ChromeOS VMs (crostini)... all use 9p!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9P_(protocol)

[ComputerGuru]

Unfortunately all the default implementations really suck at performance (for Linux and Windows, at any rate), and it’s very noticeable under IO pressure, lots of small files, etc. They're stable and seem to be correct though, which is something.

[trasz]

9P is fine as kind of lowest common denominator network filesystem, as long as you don’t hit its fundamental limitations, such as not being particularly Unix-compatible, semantics wise.

[tomcam]

I would love to understand more about what you exposed as filesystems and why. Is that on https://skife.org/ somewhere?