In a cluster of applications nodes, what are the advantages/disadvantages of placing your application binaries on a shared mount and having each of the nodes mount that, rather than having separate copies of the binaries on each node?
Is there anything that makes one approach or the other particularly bad?
Thanks
Best Answer
When I started in the financial industry, I was running systems that were comprised of gateway systems that consumed/massaged data, compute nodes to make trading decisions, NFS servers to serve applications/centralize logging and a lot of networking to bind it all together. We also centralized crontab scheduling and application monitoring configs and placed those on NFS mounts.
This was NFSv3-based, and the benefits were, um...
Downsides:
These days, you can deploy and manage your software via a configuration management system (Puppet, Chef, Ansible, etc.). Or even better, use the native packaging method of the operating system (RPM, .deb) and deploy it with configuration management:
Given that, I'd probably recommend separate copies of the applications instead of using a shared mount.