Cloud File Storage
for shared access across your VMs

Yes. The volume mounts on multiple VMs at once and they all see the same files, so standard file locking applies just as it would on any shared filesystem. Where it gets complicated is with many machines updating the same records at once. For that kind of contention, a database is usually a better fit than files on a shared volume.

No. A mounted volume shows up as an ordinary directory, so anything that reads and writes files by path, a CMS saving uploads, a worker picking up a shared queue of files, works without changes. You point it at the mount and carry on.

You connect a File Storage volume over NFS, mounting it from any compatible VM in your account as a standard filesystem path. When you add capacity at the compute layer, such as additional web servers behind a load balancer, you can mount the same volume on each VM so they work from a shared set of files.

Yes. Because you're billed on usage rather than a provisioned size, your bill tracks what's on the volume. Remove data and the cost drops, which is the opposite of provisioned storage where you pay for the allocation whether it's full or not.

For the shared-data workloads File Storage is meant for, common uploads, shared assets, a distributed working set, yes. A shared filesystem can show strain with very high concurrent I/O or huge numbers of tiny files. If that happens frequently, it is typically a sign to put that particular data in a database or in Object Storage instead.