Tradeoffs

“Object storage native” is an emerging, cross-cutting category of database in which the durability and reliability of object storage — along with a subset of S3 features (notably compare-and-swap) — are combined to provide a derivative set of capabilities with some of the same underlying strengths and scalability.

That said, even though S3-compatible object storage has a lot of beneficial properties, it has a number of limitations as well. Notably, writing and reading object contents (PUT/GET) has a latency of around ~200ms for small objects which, if not carefully designed around, can severely impact performance. Also, on some platforms (Google Cloud and Cloudflare), compare-and-swap (CAS) features have a rate limit of once per second.

Combined, these limitations translate into two notable LoonFS limitations:

• Cold (uncached) reads may cost ~200ms of upfront latency.
• Writes in busy namespaces on some cloud providers can take up to ~1s before durable acknowledgement.

We’ve accepted these tradeoffs for the scalability and efficiency benefits, and anticipate many high-throughput file-storage use cases that do not require lower response latency. That said, this tradeoff may not be acceptable for some use cases.