While he's right that S3 is the modern way, and it's likely to be cheaper than doing what I'm about to say, in the File System piece he says this -

> Each time you have to spawn a new instance of your application you will also have to copy all the images in the new instance.

Which is a little odd. This is why we have things like SANs, enterprise storage etc, and the separation of data and application servers. Scaling can be achieved by rolling out more application servers, which are linked on the backend to a high speed network storage system.

Or have I missed something?

It still won't be quite as good as passing off the load to someone else entirely, but it's a filesystem option that's nowhere near as bad.

I guess this dates from the prehistoric era when people managed their own infrastructure though. I miss that sometimes, modern devops seems to be a bit of a mess, with a lot of the people claiming to be devops engineers not really having the skills they need.