I could see a use for both - using Lustre as a shared SAN for their flame/smoke/etc suites and using pNFS for workstation/render-node shared storage. at least that's how i've deployed things in the past.
i could see this replacing isilon (which is built on freebsd) for the later use-case :)
NVMe supports SR-IOV much in the same way that NICs do - which i suspect is how AWS is delivering "physical" NICs to VMs currently. So its a pretty safe bet that this is how NVMe devices are being delivered to guest Vm's.
thus spoke the manual nvme(4):
"The nvme driver creates controller device nodes in the format /dev/nvmeX and namespace device nodes in the format /dev/nvmeXnsY."
it's been a while since i've had access to nvme gear but it "just worked" at the time - although my use case was for a a daemon that accessed the block device directly to do its own horrible things to it.
"The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System" not only does a great job at covering how the UFS filesystem is implemented, but also does a great job at explaining how and Unix systems are implemented. I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Unix internals.
As another commenter mentions SCTP can be encapsulated if needed. SCTP is actually in pretty wide use in online gaming, and has been since at least 2007...
Pretty sure that when you have to wadge a battle against obvious technology to justify your business model, your industry is going to end up on the wrong side of history.
These books are pretty much a must read for anyone interested in the internals of Unix-type systems. I keep them right next to my TCP/IP Illustrated volumes, I reckon it's always good to have good reference material handy - especially when it is well written and researched.
Trying not to be a curmudgeon - but I really don't see what the big fuss is about, or how docker is fundamentally changing anything.
Not to take anything away from docker being a decent tool in some circumstances - but really this methodology has been around in one implementation for ages on Unix platforms.
+1 from the systems engineer with over a decade experienceat cutting edge facilities - and a BA in philosophy (focused on recent continental thought, not logic). It comes down to the individual and their passion.