[chubot]

A thousand times yes. My first thought when hearing about the EBS outage was "wow that seems more fragile than NFS, no wonder it failed spectacularly." NFS presents you with this nice familiar file system interface, and then random sys admins and programmers start creating a tangled mess of dependencies by dropping stuff there, without regard to what happens when it fails. Like the EBS outage, the failures tend to surprise people.

The great quote by Leslie Lamport: "A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."

And this was an excellent and honest article about faulty programming abstractions. It's basically bashing you over the head with the "Fallacies of distributed computing". Don't silently turn local operations into remote operations. They're not the same thing and have to be treated differently at all levels.

Even Werner Vogels wrote a diatribe against "transparency", which is the same issue by another name: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=700969849916494972...

So I wonder what he thinks of this architectural choice. You have to give up something when communicating over the network. Vogels seems to have chosen consistency rather than availability in his designs. This paper was a turning point in his research. Its candor surprised me.

The file system interface does not let you relax consistency, so by default you have chosen availability. As the Joyent guys honestly remarked, this often has to be learned the hard way.