Secure alternatives to NFS for RS Teams in HA on Cloud

[kevinwtbolger]

Within the RStudio Admin guides, there is a little bit of discrepancy on the language of the recommended file share systems for products deployed in HA across Teams. However, the commonality is that NFS v3 is recommended and supported.

If security is concerned about people mounting on to these NFS volumes maliciously, what are some alternatives. Specifically:

• Do all RStudio Teams products support NFS v4 with Encryption?

• Do all RStudio Teams products support use of S3 or other cloud blob storage?

• Are there other options that could be considered that are compatible with the latest versions of the RStudio Teams products?

Thanks

[alexkgold]

Hi @kevinwtbolger,

NFS v4 should work just fine. If you're configuring RSP with project sharing, you'll need to configure ACLs, which work differently in v3 vs v4. To be clear -- either should work, but configuration process is different by version.

For RStudio Package Manager, an S3 bucket can be used as a backend storage.

For RStudio Server Pro and RStudio Connect, the external storage volume must actually be mounted into the filesystem. You can technically mount an S3 bucket with certain external system libraries, but we do not recommend doing so for latency reasons.

Hope that's helpful!

[kevinwtbolger]

Thanks @alexkgold this answers my query.

It seems the security concerns then around NFS will have to be resolved on the IT end as its the recommended solution to use NFS.

Just to be clear, enabling encryption on NFS v4 wont hinder RStudio Teams products ability to mount/access files?

[alexkgold]

Correct. Happy encrypting!