Juicedata, New US Player in Cloud File System

Juicedata, Inc is a new US player in cloud-based file system.

The company develops JuiceFS, a managed metadata service that turns any object storages (Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage) into shared POSIX file systems. As the product supports the S3 API, it should work with any compliant on-prem object storage product that exposes the S3 API. The service appears like any local file system and Juice provides the file access semantics to allow classic deployment and usage by traditional applications.

As a shared file system, the design of JuiceFS provides interesting features such as any committed modification could be visible by all the clients. JuiceFS provides a consistent view across all the files/directories and all the clients.

JuiceFS is based on FUSE and the official doc mentions: “JuiceFS is a distributed file system, all the metadata and data must be fetched using network, it will be slower (higher latency) than local filesystem in general. The latency of metadata is determined by 1 (reading) or 2 (writing) round trip(s) between client and metadata service (usually 1-3ms within same region). The latency of first byte is determined by the performance of underlying object storage (10-100ms). Throughput of sequential read/write could be 50MB/s – 400MB/s, depends on network bandwidth and how the data could be compressed. JuiceFS is built with multiple layers of caching (invalidated automatically), once the caching is warmed up, the latency and throughput of JuiceFS could be close to local filesystem (having the overhead of FUSE).”

Data are persistent and stored on object storage with a special designed format for better efficiency.

In term of pricing the product is available as a free service or a standard one at an attractive fee:

	Free	Standard
Limit	1TB, 100,000 files, 10 clients	10PB, 100 million files, 1,000 clients
Features	POSIX files ystem compression encryption in-transit	POSIX files ystem compression encryption in-transit and at-rest atomic snapshot global flock GEO replication
Service SLA	99.9%	99.95%
Support	Forum	Forum/email
Price	Free	$0.02*/GB/month
* The price does not include the cost from object storage, you will pay for it separately. The fee is billed at unit of GB-hour, each file is billed as at least 256KB.

One of the founder of Juicedata is Davies Liu who was software engineer at Databricks, software engineer at Facebook, system architect, leader of core system platform at Douban in Beijing, China

The start-up released form D regarding $800,000 debt financing.