This section introduces aspects that may be helpful in facilitating a better understanding of the inventions. Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is in the prior art or what is not in the prior art.
In some known cloud file systems, cloud providers treat the different types of available storage devices in a similar way, even though some storage devices have differing associated costs and/or properties that make different storage devices better for certain operations than others. In some of these systems, the entire image of the file system is stored in at least two types of storage devices, while the operations are performed on the image stored on the higher performance storage device. In this scheme, there are charges for the higher performance storage device running the entire virtual machine instance as opposed to only using the higher performance storage device for the storage actually used in the virtual machine. As a result, loading the entire image of the file system into the higher performance storage device leads to larger storage and operating costs even though only a small fraction of the file system is actually used by the users.