Why I Built Roadrunner SMB: Native Windows File Sharing on Amazon EFS

A few years ago, my wife of 45 years was diagnosed with cancer. As it progressed, I stepped back from a regular job to care for her — we sold our place in the city and moved out to the lake property we'd owned for decades. I needed work I could do remotely, on my own schedule, without walking away from the time we have left together. That's the honest starting point for this company. Not a market opportunity. A constraint I had to build around.

So when I went looking for what to do next, I went back to the place I'd had the most fun — technically and with the people I worked with — adding real value to the AWS® platform.

The pattern I'd seen before

I learned to build for AWS in the early SoftNAS® days, back when the whole industry was racing to serve the same wave of enterprises migrating into the cloud. I've also built inside a company the size of Citrix®, which teaches you something SoftNAS-scale startups can't: growing something established is a completely different discipline than building something new. Different muscles. Different failure modes.

Somewhere in that mix I picked up a pattern I've watched work more than once: find the seam between an old, well-understood world and a new one, and build the bridge nobody's gotten around to building well.

I know AWS Marketplace better than many people building on it — it's come a long way since the early days. I've spent years deep in VDI and NAS filer architecture — the unglamorous plumbing under every Windows® file share anyone's ever clicked into without thinking about it. And I had an itch I couldn't shake: bring that experience into a market that's actually mature now, instead of chasing something brand new and unproven.

The seam I landed on: the Windows world, and the largely Linux-native cloud underneath it.

Betting on EFS

Specifically: Amazon EFS®.

I watched EFS grow up alongside SoftNAS in those early migration years. Both still serve customers well today. But EFS, in particular, has matured into — I'll say it plainly, more on this in a future post — arguably the best NFS filesystem ever built. Elastic, durable, regionally resilient, priced for how storage actually gets used rather than how you're forced to provision it.

The gap is that EFS speaks Linux. It doesn't speak Windows. And most of the Windows file-sharing workloads that exist — home directories, department shares, VDI profiles — don't need a full clustered Windows file server running an NTFS® filesystem. They need something that speaks native SMB and Active Directory®, sits on top of a modern cloud filesystem, and doesn't force you to guess at storage and throughput tiers six months in advance.

Nobody had built that bridge well. So that's what I set out to build.

Every day, organizations keep paying for Windows file servers they don't actually need anymore — not because NTFS does something irreplaceable, but because SMB never had a real bridge to cloud-native storage. They're provisioning capacity they'll never touch, patching servers they'd rather retire, and designing around constraints that stopped being necessary years ago. That's the gap I set out to close.

What Roadrunner SMB™ is

Roadrunner SMB isn't a storage product. Amazon EFS is the filesystem — it does what EFS has always done, and does it well. Roadrunner SMB is the protocol layer in front of it: the piece that makes EFS speak native Windows SMB and AD, with the performance and permissions behavior Windows clients already expect, without the provisioning guesswork that comes bundled with the alternatives.

It's a bridge. Old world, new world. That's the pattern I know how to build, and it's the reason this company exists.

Where this is going

I'll say the quiet part out loud: my vision for Roadrunner SMB is to someday be the best elastic, Windows-compatible file sharing solution for EFS.

Maybe it already is.

That's not a claim about market share or funding rounds. It's a claim about the bet itself — that EFS is the right foundation, that the protocol-adapter approach is the right shape for the problem, and that most Windows file sharing has been carrying complexity it never needed. Everything after this post — the architecture, the numbers, the roadmap — is me making that case in detail.

Getting the band back together

Here's the part that isn't just about me — and it's also the part where I'll be straight with you about what "the team" means today.

Right now, the team is me and modern AI tooling — and that combination is a genuine force multiplier, not a placeholder for a "real" team. Work that once took a floor of engineers weeks or months per sprint, can now be done in hours or days per sprint, with the domain expertise and QA test suites to know whether what comes back is actually right. On production infrastructure, that judgment is the part that matters. It's how one founder can design, build, ship, and support a real product and stay responsive to customers. Roadrunner SMB runs entirely in your AWS account, on standard AWS services, with no proprietary control plane I have to babysit. The architecture is built so the software keeps working whether I'm at my desk or not.

Where it goes from here is the fun part. Over a long career I've worked with people I'd drop everything to work with again — engineers, sales, and support who were the best at what they did at SoftNAS, at Citrix, at stops in between. As the business earns it, I'll bring them back in, one at a time. Not because the company needs rescuing from being one person, but because the best people make a good thing better.

And here's why that model should make a customer more comfortable, not less: Roadrunner SMB is customer-funded, not venture-funded. This isn't a "venture" bet — it's a bet on the future of AWS, EFS, and the need for a reliable, modern, cloud-native Windows-compatible bridge. The team grows at the pace paying customers justify — not the pace a term sheet demands and not the pace an exit clock forces. Every hire is funded by customers already getting value. That's a company built to still be here in ten years, serving you, rather than one built to get acquired and shut down in three. I'd rather build it right than build it fast.

Why this, why now

I could have looked for a normal job with the flexibility I needed. Plenty of people in my position do, and there's no shame in it. But I wanted to build again — at my own pace, on my own terms, for a market I understand better than most people currently working in it.

That's the level of commitment behind this: I'm not doing this because it's convenient. I'm doing it because it's the work I know how to do well, at a time in my life when doing work I'm good at, on my own schedule, matters more than it ever has.

The bridge is built and ready to carry your traffic

If you're wrestling with Windows file shares on AWS — FSx bills that don't match how you actually work, DIY Samba you'd rather not babysit, or VDI profiles that crawl at login — I'd like to hear about it.

No hard sell. Start wherever makes sense: see how Roadrunner SMB fits next to FSx, walk through the architecture, or just send me your questions. Right now, I answer them myself.