Filippo Valsorda's "frood" Is a Hoopy Immutable NAS Running Entirely From an Initial RAM Filesystem - Hackster.io
Cryptography engineer Filippo Valsorda has set up a network attached storage (NAS) system with a difference: it lacks the usual root filesystem, and instead operates entirely from an immutable initial RAM filesystem (initramfs).
"My NAS, frood, has a bit of a weird setup. It's just one big initramfs containing a whole Alpine Linux system," Valsorda explains. "It's delightful and I am not sure why it's not more common. I’ve always liked running systems from memory: it’s fast and prevents wear on the system storage device, which is often some janky SD Card, because the good drives are dedicated to the ZFS pool. However, you immediately have the problem of how to persist configuration changes."