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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

It is absurdly scalable in contrast to other filesystems, and extremely reliable. Also, you get per-file control over replication level (file-level durability/availability), plus comprehensive permissions management.

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The permissions management (user/group but with cloud roles) is what I miss most. NFS style approaches assume that I will give every user an unprivileged user on their local machine and deny root access so they can't just create a user with a different ID. S3 style ACLs per-object are just very confusing and no one is going to set those. S3 access policies per role are obviously not a solution because that requires centralizing lists of what the permissions are. I just want to be able to assign a chmod and a chown on a file for a cloud user and group... And don't forget about how fantastic the group tooling was.

I also miss being able to write files with /ttl=72h/ anywhere in the path and knowing they will be cleaned up automatically without me doing any more work. In contrast S3 just rots. Need to find an intern to write an SQS pipeline to schedule file deletions :)

I mean creating a lifecycle rule on a ln s3 bucket is pretty easy

The scope is entirely different. You can't grant privileges to create lifecycle rules on a subtree of a bucket. You set the rules on the entire bucket.

It's practically useless by comparison.

yes, but its per bucket rather than namespace/key. plus IAMs is a pain in the arse to setup

> NFS style approaches assume that I will give every user an unprivileged user on their local machine

With Kerberos it kinda works, each client is bound to a UID instead of blindly trusting the client, but very few people nowadays deploy this ancient tech (and it's fragile).

Is the permission also use Zanzibar? or is it using a different thing?

If you work at G, you should be able to see how D does permissions by looking at its ACL checking code (start with one of the files in the D server code that defines an op, and you can get to the permissions code pretty quickly). There's a lot of code in Colossus/D that is special because it has to be able to come up in a nearly empty cluster.

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