Using an External File System (Volume Services)

Question

Using an External File System (Volume Services) in cloud foundry is a bad practice ? it is follow the 12 Factor Application Patterns ?

Answer 1

Good or bad are a little subjective and depend on the circumstances.

What does your app need to run successfully? If you have a legacy app that needs persistent storage, you can make that run by using an volume service or you can spend a lot of time and money rewriting the app. IMHO, volume services are a good thing there.

At the same time, I wouldn't start by writing a greenfield (ie brand new) app that depends on volume services. There are drawbacks to using volume services, and performance/scaling can be concerns. You're probably better off designing your new app to follow 12 Factor patterns. It'll be easier to deploy the app to Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes and ultimately scale better.

Hope that helps!