It makes me curious if there are any other real-world use cases for diskless. Are there any customers who would benefit from such a configuration from major cloud providers? E.g. a diskless EC2 instance type that ran off of a RAM disk?
OVPN[1] (Swedish jurisdiction) have been diskless[2] since day one, and this has been tested and proven in court[3]:
"To summarize the verdict, the Rights Alliance and their security experts have not been able prove any weaknesses in OVPN's systems that could mean that logs are stored. OVPN therefore wins the information injunction as our statements and evidence regarding our no log VPN policy have not been disproven. The movie companies also need to pay OVPN's legal fees which amounts to 108 000 SEK (roughly $12300 at current exchange rate)."
[1]https://www.ovpn.com [2]https://www.ovpn.com/en/security [3]https://www.ovpn.com/en/blog/ovpn-wins-court-order
As an example, X Terminals all worked this way. Much of the old Sun Microsystems "The Network Is The Computer" pitch was having low-end, diskless SPARC machines (e.g. SLC, ELC) netbooting and mounting disk and doing heavy lift compute via NFS & X11 from large SPARC servers and storage arrays.
You can look at the Linux Terminal Server Project (ltsp.org) for some reasonably current ideas of what someone might do with this.
Simple example - thin client that boots off readonly NFS and just mounts user dir when they log in. Or one step further and have image with remote desktop software and nothing else.
More complex one - storage server that boots over network so you don't have to manage any OS install on disks and can use full capacity of drives for storage
Nowadays you could use similar approach to run cluster for in-memory compute tasks or similar. PXE boot identical OS to bunch of servers and have them compute sth. If you need to repurpose them for something else - reboot them into a different PXE boot image. In case of VPN providers the motivation is probably to prevent (permanent) logging of sensitive information.
Not clear what 'diskless' means in this situation anyway.
For small uses, I would think tmpfs would be fine. And I would personally tend to think that non-small data probably shouldn't be local anyways (because most data should live in a central database and/or on a SAN or ceph or whatever). Obviously it depends on your exact usecase, but usually.
Submitted URL was https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/12/30/review-of-2022/, which is a list, and that item looks like the most interesting thing on this list. (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... for why we do this sometimes)
If there's a better URL, we can change it again. I just don't think year-in-review laundry lists make for very good discussion, because inevitably they produce generic referendum-style threads about the company or project.