Cloud Filestore, provided by GCP (Google Cloud Platform), is a storage solution similar to Network File Systems (NFS). It enables you to store various types of data, much like a regular computer filesystem such as the C drive in Windows.
By attaching Filestore instances to your VMs, you can utilize it as an external file storage device. This is particularly useful when using an instance group with multiple VMs that require access to a shared file system. For instance, if one VM within the group adds a new file to the Filestore instance hosting the file storage system, the other VMs in the group will also have visibility to the newly added file. Cloud Filestore facilitates the seamless sharing of a common file storage system among multiple computers.
To draw a comparison, consider purchasing a USB flash drive from Amazon with a capacity of 128GB. You load data onto it, plug it into your computer, and it is recognized, allowing you to access the flash drive.
With Filestore, the concept is similar, but imagine that when you plug the USB flash drive into a port, three other computers can simultaneously access it. It’s like having multiple computers view the contents of the same flash drive in real time. In fact, you can have any number of computers accessing the same flash drive simultaneously.
Cloud Filestore functions similarly to a network-attached storage device (NAS), where an external hard drive or flash drive is connected to a network for multiple computers to access. In this case, Cloud Filestore serves as Google’s version of a NAS, enabling efficient sharing of files among interconnected systems.