Regarding the question, I use SSHFS to mount directories on remote machines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSHFS
Also, coherence: sshfs manages to hide a lot of the ugly details, but you'll meet coherence problems on sshfs much more often than on nfs. They both do aggressive caching, but nfs gets help from the server side and is thus usually better.
I'd started using ssfs for something and found this slowness issue. I asked my mentor about what could be done to improve it, and he said "If you're using sshfs, you've already lost".
'scp' is very slow as well. Anything bigger than a small text file gets rsync'd. Small text files get scp'd, because remembering rsync flags is a minor annoyance :)