Comment by zbentley
3 hours ago
ZFS snapshots can be transmitted over the network, with some diff-only and deduplication gains if the remote destination has an older instance of the same ZFS filesystem. It’s not perfect, and the worst case is still a full copy, but the tooling and efficiency wins for the ordinary case are battle-tested and capable.
Yes, for sure, and stuff like this is really useful when rebalancing storage nodes, for example.
My point is that for the use case of offering a Postgres service with CoW branching as a key feature, you can't really escape some form of separation of storage and compute.
Btw, don't really want to talk too much about it yet, but our proprietary storage engine (Xatastor) is basically ZFS exposed over NVMe-OF. We'll announce it in a couple of weeks, and we'll have a detailed technical blog post then on pros/cons.