Google Cloud Managed Lustre vs SeaweedFS

Google Cloud Managed Lustre is a fully managed parallel file system for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing workloads. Documented uses include HPC simulations, modeling and analysis, and machine-learning training and inference. It supports throughput up to 10 TBps and storage capacity up to 84,016,000 GiB (80.1 PiB). POSIX compliance is intended to preserve compatibility with existing applications, tools, and workflows. Instances can mount to Compute Engine virtual machines and Google Kubernetes Engine clusters. The service imports data from and exports data to Cloud Storage, including incremental transfers of new or changed files; only one transfer operation per instance can run at a time. Data is encrypted at rest and in transit to and within Google Cloud. Per-instance policies define maintenance windows and exclusion periods. Capacity is provisioned, and unused provisioned capacity is billed. Pricing is from $0.06/mo; hourly rates vary by month, and monthly charges use the hourly rate and hours in that month. Files can be up to 0.5 PiB, with 20 instances maximum per project. Lustre over TCP is supported, and managed backups are not available.

SeaweedFS is a distributed storage system that serves S3 objects, Iceberg tables, and POSIX files from one cluster. It supports S3, POSIX mounts, HDFS-compatible access, an Iceberg REST catalog, and WebDAV. Its built-in Iceberg catalog supports queries with Spark, Trino, Dremio, and DuckDB. The product describes scaling from gigabytes to petabytes and supporting billions of files. Development and testing under 25 TB are free, but production deployments require a paid license regardless of size. Monthly capacity licensing is $2 a month, based on used storage including replication or erasure-coding overhead; yearly licensing is $20 a year. Enterprise features include deleted-file recovery within a configurable retention window, point-in-time restoration, repair of missing or corrupted erasure-coding shards, and OIDC sign-in with role mapping. The free 25 TB trial limits deleted-file recovery retention to one hour. Enterprise support is optional and priced separately from capacity licensing. Community support is free and has no guaranteed response time. SeaweedFS is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows, with API access and self-hosted deployment.