> 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
The main issue with this is that this would be a vendor specific solution that would lock everybody.
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.
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 :)