{"slug": "juicefs", "name": "JuiceFS", "category": "files", "category_name": "Files, sync and backup", "description": "", "recommenders": 5, "commenters": 13, "warners": 2, "score": 4.045, "rising": 1.02, "first": "2026-01-11", "latest": "2026-09-15", "why": "We've been using JuiceFS in production for a few months now and I'm a big fan.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 5, "neutral": 5, "compare": 2, "warn": 3}, "spark": [0, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "We've been using JuiceFS in production for a few months now and I'm a big fan.", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "juicefs.com", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://juicefs.com", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["JuiceFS"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 795370656, "item_id": 49710666, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49710666", "by": "stevefan1999", "date": "2026-09-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use JuiceFS https://github.com/juicedata/juicefs if you think the Chinese are worth the trust", "excerpt": "I use JuiceFS https://github.com/juicedata/juicefs if you think the Chinese are worth the trust", "context": "", "use_case": "single-node local S3 alternative to MinIO", "switched_from": "", "story": "Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S3"}, {"id": 791388880, "item_id": 49461805, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49461805", "by": "theaniketmaurya", "date": "2026-08-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We use it for our sandboxes at Celesto to enable a durable S3-backed file system.", "excerpt": "JuiceFS is an open-source distributed filesystem. We use it for our sandboxes at Celesto to enable a durable S3-backed file system. VMs have rootfs on disk to store system files and installed items, and the /home directory is a JuiceFS volume. On top of this, we also persist the rootfs with a periodic backup to keep the whole system persistent. Please read the blog for more details on how we use JuiceFS.", "context": "works at Celesto", "use_case": "durable S3-backed sandbox filesystem", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 757090176, "item_id": 47318136, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47318136", "by": "smithclay", "date": "2026-03-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it's cool tech.", "excerpt": "sprites.dev / fly.io has publicly said they are using a variant of JuiceFS for the object-storage-to-VM-filesystem stuff, it's cool tech. * https://fly.io/blog/design-and-implementation/ * https://juicefs.com", "context": "", "use_case": "Object-storage-backed filesystem", "switched_from": "", "story": "Launch HN: Terminal Use (YC W26) \u2013 Vercel for filesystem-based agents"}, {"id": 746538688, "item_id": 46658668, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46658668", "by": "hnarn", "date": "2026-01-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Sounds ideal for your kind of situation where a filesystem is being abused as a database", "excerpt": "According to this link: https://vonng.com/en/pg/pgfs/ > The magic is: JuiceFS also supports using PostgreSQL as both metadata and object data storage backend! This means you only need to change JuiceFS\u2019s backend to an existing PostgreSQL instance to get a database-based \u201cfilesystem.\u201d Sounds ideal for your kind of situation where a filesystem is being abused as a database :-)", "context": "", "use_case": "Distributed filesystem on PostgreSQL", "switched_from": "", "story": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"}, {"id": 746331280, "item_id": 46645705, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46645705", "by": "adamcharnock", "date": "2026-01-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We've been using JuiceFS in production for a few months now and I'm a big fan.", "excerpt": "We've been using JuiceFS in production for a few months now and I'm a big fan. I've felt for a while that block-level filesystems do not adapt at all well to being implemented across a network (with my personal experience being of AWS EBS and OpenEBS Mayastor). So the fact that JuiceFS is interfaces at the POSIX layer felt intuitively better to me. I also like that it can keep a local read-cache, rather than having t", "context": "works at infra firm Lithus", "use_case": "Kubernetes RWX shared storage", "switched_from": "", "story": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 782077856, "item_id": 48879866, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48879866", "by": "selfhoster1312", "date": "2026-07-12", "stance": "warn", "quote": "benchmarked with JuiceFS using torrents and was catastrophic", "excerpt": "I've been curious about ZeroFS. My usecase is running a real POSIX filesystem on top of garage for integration with non-S3 services. I've had very bad (short) experiment with JuiceFS (1). Is it worth benchmarking `zerofs mount` with garage? My usecase is NAS storage of many small files + some big files (think big shared SMB for a non-profit). I need: - fsync durability (as promised on zerofs homepage), including sqli", "context": "", "use_case": "POSIX filesystem over object storage", "switched_from": "", "story": "ZeroFS vs. Amazon S3 Files"}, {"id": 746233488, "item_id": 46639593, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46639593", "by": "selfhoster1312", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "juiceFS performance totalling collapsing under very small files/operations", "excerpt": "I'm not an expert in any way, but i personally benchmarked [1] juiceFS performance totalling collapsing under very small files/operations (torrenting). It's good to be skeptical, but it might just be that the bar is very low for this specific usecase (IIRC juiceFS was configured and optimized for block sizes of several MBs). https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage/issues/1021", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"}, {"id": 746233088, "item_id": 46639568, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46639568", "by": "selfhoster1312", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "i just assumed JuiceFS was a very bad fit for archives shared through Bittorrent", "excerpt": "I have very limited experiences with object storage, but my humble benchmarks with juicefs + minio/garage [1] showed very bad performance (i.e. total collapse within a few hours) when running lots of small operations (torrents). I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of tuning that can be achieved, but after days of reading docs and experimenting with different settings i just assumed JuiceFS was a very bad fit for", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"}]}], "who": [{"by": "theaniketmaurya", "context": "works at Celesto", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49461805", "date": "2026-08-27"}, {"by": "adamcharnock", "context": "works at infra firm Lithus", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46645705", "date": "2026-01-16"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["single-node local s3 alternative to minio", "durable s3-backed sandbox filesystem", "posix filesystem over object storage", "s3-backed filesystem", "distributed posix filesystem backend", "object-storage-backed filesystem"], "compared": [{"slug": "zerofs", "name": "ZeroFS", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "minio", "name": "MinIO", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "redis", "name": "Redis", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "sqlite", "name": "SQLite", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "garage", "name": "Garage", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 746305648, "item_id": 46644103, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644103", "by": "suavesu", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "support more 10 options, include redis", "excerpt": "yes, support more 10 options, include redis, SQL-like DB, TiKV, FoundationDB, and more. see here -> https://juicefs.com/docs/community/databases_for_metadata", "context": "", "use_case": "distributed file system", "switched_from": "", "story": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"}, {"id": 746274048, "item_id": 46642128, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642128", "by": "daviesliu", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "JuiceFS can be scaled to hundreds of PB by design, also is verified by thousands of users in production", "excerpt": "JuiceFS can be scaled to hundreds of PB by design, also is verified by thousands of users in production [1]. [1] https://juicefs.com/en/blog/company/2025-recap-artificial-intelligence-storage", "context": "", "use_case": "Distributed file system", "switched_from": "", "story": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46637165", "title": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3", "mentions": 13}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49709381", "title": "Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S3", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49461804", "title": "item 49461804", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48874297", "title": "ZeroFS vs. Amazon S3 Files", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48761493", "title": "Show HN: ZeroFS \u2013 A log-structured filesystem for S3", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48667101", "title": "Show HN: A durable filesystem layer for AI agents", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"neutral": 4, "compare": 1, "warn": 2, "recommend": 2}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-07": {"compare": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 795370656, "item_id": 49710666, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49710666", "by": "stevefan1999", "date": "2026-09-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use JuiceFS https://github.com/juicedata/juicefs if you think the Chinese are worth the trust", "excerpt": "I use JuiceFS https://github.com/juicedata/juicefs if you think the Chinese are worth the trust", "context": "", "use_case": "single-node local S3 alternative to MinIO", "switched_from": "", "story": "Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S3"}, {"id": 791388880, "item_id": 49461805, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49461805", "by": "theaniketmaurya", "date": "2026-08-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We use it for our sandboxes at Celesto to enable a durable S3-backed file system.", "excerpt": "JuiceFS is an open-source distributed filesystem. We use it for our sandboxes at Celesto to enable a durable S3-backed file system. VMs have rootfs on disk to store system files and installed items, and the /home directory is a JuiceFS volume. On top of this, we also persist the rootfs with a periodic backup to keep the whole system persistent. Please read the blog for more details on how we use JuiceFS.", "context": "works at Celesto", "use_case": "durable S3-backed sandbox filesystem", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 782077856, "item_id": 48879866, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48879866", "by": "selfhoster1312", "date": "2026-07-12", "stance": "warn", "quote": "benchmarked with JuiceFS using torrents and was catastrophic", "excerpt": "I've been curious about ZeroFS. My usecase is running a real POSIX filesystem on top of garage for integration with non-S3 services. I've had very bad (short) experiment with JuiceFS (1). Is it worth benchmarking `zerofs mount` with garage? My usecase is NAS storage of many small files + some big files (think big shared SMB for a non-profit). I need: - fsync durability (as promised on zerofs homepage), including sqli", "context": "", "use_case": "POSIX filesystem over object storage", "switched_from": "", "story": "ZeroFS vs. Amazon S3 Files"}, {"id": 780235632, "item_id": 48764727, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48764727", "by": "ChocolateGod", "date": "2026-07-02", "stance": "compare", "quote": "The HA certainly makes this more of an alternative to JuiceFS now.", "excerpt": "The HA certainly makes this more of an alternative to JuiceFS now. Would need something like HAProxy to correctly handle failover for NFS though?", "context": "", "use_case": "S3-backed filesystem", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: ZeroFS \u2013 A log-structured filesystem for S3"}, {"id": 779335057, "item_id": 48708441, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708441", "by": "theaniketmaurya", "date": "2026-06-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "we use juicefs which separates the actual data and metadata", "excerpt": "SmolFS has a distributed posix filesystem. we use juicefs which separates the actual data and metadata (permissions, file size changes etc). Metadata store provides atomicity and locking primitives which keeps the file system horizontally scalable while maintaining concurrent mounts and handle concurrent agent operations.", "context": "", "use_case": "distributed POSIX filesystem backend", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: A durable filesystem layer for AI agents"}, {"id": 757090176, "item_id": 47318136, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47318136", "by": "smithclay", "date": "2026-03-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it's cool tech.", "excerpt": "sprites.dev / fly.io has publicly said they are using a variant of JuiceFS for the object-storage-to-VM-filesystem stuff, it's cool tech. * https://fly.io/blog/design-and-implementation/ * https://juicefs.com", "context": "", "use_case": "Object-storage-backed filesystem", "switched_from": "", "story": "Launch HN: Terminal Use (YC W26) \u2013 Vercel for filesystem-based agents"}, {"id": 746538688, "item_id": 46658668, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46658668", "by": "hnarn", "date": "2026-01-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Sounds ideal for your kind of situation where a filesystem is being abused as a database", "excerpt": "According to this link: https://vonng.com/en/pg/pgfs/ > The magic is: JuiceFS also supports using PostgreSQL as both metadata and object data storage backend! This means you only need to change JuiceFS\u2019s backend to an existing PostgreSQL instance to get a database-based \u201cfilesystem.\u201d Sounds ideal for your kind of situation where a filesystem is being abused as a database :-)", "context": "", "use_case": "Distributed filesystem on PostgreSQL", "switched_from": "", "story": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"}, {"id": 746331280, "item_id": 46645705, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46645705", "by": "adamcharnock", "date": "2026-01-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We've been using JuiceFS in production for a few months now and I'm a big fan.", "excerpt": "We've been using JuiceFS in production for a few months now and I'm a big fan. I've felt for a while that block-level filesystems do not adapt at all well to being implemented across a network (with my personal experience being of AWS EBS and OpenEBS Mayastor). So the fact that JuiceFS is interfaces at the POSIX layer felt intuitively better to me. I also like that it can keep a local read-cache, rather than having t", "context": "works at infra firm Lithus", "use_case": "Kubernetes RWX shared storage", "switched_from": "", "story": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"}, {"id": 746308288, "item_id": 46644268, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644268", "by": "suavesu", "date": "2026-01-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "pjdtest result of JuiceFS", "excerpt": "pjdtest result of JuiceFS -> https://juicefs.com/en/blog/engineering/posix-compatibility-comparison-among-four-file-system-on-the-cloud", "context": "", "use_case": "distributed POSIX file system", "switched_from": "", "story": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"}, {"id": 746307088, "item_id": 46644193, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644193", "by": "suavesu", "date": "2026-01-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "The MLPerf performance of JuiceFS last year", "excerpt": "The MLPerf performance of JuiceFS last year, FUSE client, and TCP/IP network. There're some analysis about performance and bottleneck. -> https://juicefs.com/en/blog/engineering/mlperf-storage-v2-ai-training-storage-performance", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"}, {"id": 746281152, "item_id": 46642572, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642572", "by": "onionjake", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "We developed Object Mount (formerly cunoFS) (https://www.storj.io/object-mount?hn=1) specifically to not rely on any metadata storage other than S3 AND preserve 1:1 mapping of objects to files AND support for POSIX. We have a direct mode that uses LD_PRELOAD to keep everything in userspace so no FUSE overhead. This approach isn't right for every use case and juice might be a better fit for this sort of 'direct block ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"}, {"id": 746233488, "item_id": 46639593, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46639593", "by": "selfhoster1312", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "juiceFS performance totalling collapsing under very small files/operations", "excerpt": "I'm not an expert in any way, but i personally benchmarked [1] juiceFS performance totalling collapsing under very small files/operations (torrenting). It's good to be skeptical, but it might just be that the bar is very low for this specific usecase (IIRC juiceFS was configured and optimized for block sizes of several MBs). https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage/issues/1021", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"}, {"id": 746233088, "item_id": 46639568, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46639568", "by": "selfhoster1312", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "i just assumed JuiceFS was a very bad fit for archives shared through Bittorrent", "excerpt": "I have very limited experiences with object storage, but my humble benchmarks with juicefs + minio/garage [1] showed very bad performance (i.e. total collapse within a few hours) when running lots of small operations (torrents). I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of tuning that can be achieved, but after days of reading docs and experimenting with different settings i just assumed JuiceFS was a very bad fit for", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"}, {"id": 746231713, "item_id": 46639482, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46639482", "by": "sabslikesobs", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "those really helped de-abstractify what JuiceFS is for", "excerpt": "See also their User Stories: https://juicefs.com/en/blog/user-stories I'm not an enterprise-storage guy (just sqlite on a local volume for me so far!) so those really helped de-abstractify what JuiceFS is for.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"}, {"id": 746228784, "item_id": 46639299, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46639299", "by": "mrkurt", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It backs its metadata up to S3.", "excerpt": "It backs its metadata up to S3. You do need metadata to map inodes / slices / chunks to s3 objects, though. Tigris has a one-to-one FUSE that does what you want: https://github.com/tigrisdata/tigrisfs", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"}, {"id": 746216432, "item_id": 46638527, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46638527", "by": "tptacek", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "", "excerpt": "I'm betting this is on the front page today (as opposed to any other day; Juice is very neat and doesn't need us to hype it) because of our Sprites post, which goes into some detail about how we use Juice (for the time being; I'm not sure if we'll keep it this way). The TL;DR relevant to your comment is: we tore out a lot of the metadata stuff, and our metadata storage is SQLite + Litestream.io, which gives us fast l", "context": "built Sprites at Krea", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"}, {"id": 746205249, "item_id": 46637828, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46637828", "by": "Eikon", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "compare", "quote": "outperforms JuiceFS", "excerpt": "ZeroFS [0] outperforms JuiceFS on common small file workloads [1] while only requiring S3 and no 3rd party database. [0] https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS [1] https://www.zerofs.net/zerofs-vs-juicefs", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3"}, {"id": 745218048, "item_id": 46576128, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46576128", "by": "dangoodmanUT", "date": "2026-01-11", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Seems like they are using JuiceFS under the hood", "excerpt": "Alright nerd-snipe snooping research post happning now! Seems like they are using JuiceFS under the hood, with an overlay root for your CoW semantics. JuiceFS gives them instant clone (because they're not cloning the whole rootfs), while the chnages to the overlay are done as an overlayfs and probably synced back to S3 via a custom block device they have mounted into firecracker. You can also see they are using juice", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Code and Let Live"}]}