We're working on switching to CephFS which looks very promising. See the relevant issue for more info: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/1
I can get someone from the backend performance team to comment too if you'd like :)
Sure!
> the biggest bottleneck at this point is with the file system.
Would something like AWS EFS [1] solve the problem?
It might not be a practical solution from a cost perspective though. Eg: for 50TB of data at $0.3/GB/month
0.3*1024*50 = $15360/month
We build a product that you can host yourself. If we only solve the scaling issue by pushing it down to a specific vendor, then there is no actual solution.
The way we are facing the problem is first by enabling a really easy and simple form of sharding (that would solve most of the issues that a lot of big customers may face), and then by using an open source underlaying filesystem that can scale reasonably well.