File Store concepts

Understanding the key concepts behind evroc File Store helps you use the service effectively and design your applications to take advantage of its capabilities.

What is File Store?

File Store is a fully managed file storage service that provides shared file system access to multiple virtual machines (VMs) simultaneously. Unlike block storage volumes that can only be attached to one VM at a time, a File Store instance can be mounted by multiple VMs, allowing them to share files and collaborate on data.

File Store runs within your project's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Once you create a file store, any VM in the same VPC can mount it and access the shared data. This network-level access control is the only authentication mechanism for File Store — there is no additional instance-level access control.

When to use File Store

File Store is ideal for workloads that require:

  • Shared access - Multiple VMs need to read and write the same files
  • Content management - Web servers, content repositories, and document management systems
  • Data sharing - Analytics pipelines, batch processing, and data lakes
  • Legacy applications - Enterprise applications migrated from on-premises environments
  • Development workflows - Shared code repositories, build artifacts, and development environments

File Store isn't suitable for:

  • High-performance database storage (use block storage instead)
  • Single-VM workloads that don't need shared access (use block storage instead)
  • Multi-zone deployments requiring synchronous replication

Protocol support

File Store supports using the NFSv4.1 protocol for accessing file systems.

Zonal service

File Store is a zonal service, meaning each File Store runs in a specific availability zone:

  • Data locality - All data and compute resources are in the same zone
  • Performance - Low latency when clients access the service from the same zone
  • No cross-zone replication - Each File Store is independent

Note: While you can mount a File Store from a VM in a different zone (within the same region/VPC), performance isn't guaranteed. Cross-zone traffic traverses the regional network and may experience higher latency.

Access control

Access to the File Store is controlled at the network level through security groups:

  • VMs must be in the same VPC as the File Store
  • By default, NFS traffic is automatically allowed within the same VPC through the default-allow-intra-vpc security group (no configuration required)
  • You only need to configure security group rules if you have removed default security groups or attached custom restrictive security groups to your VMs
  • Standard Linux file permissions control access to files within the mount

Limits and quotas

File Store is designed to grow transparently with your needs. There are no capacity limits. The service scales automatically as you store more data without requiring any configuration changes. See Limits and quotas for other service limits that apply.

Next steps