Google Cloud Managed Lustre vs Tahoe-LAFS

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.

Tahoe-LAFS is free, open-source software for storing files across multiple servers. Before upload, a client encrypts each file with a unique key. Erasure coding distributes each file as shares, allowing recovery when some storage servers fail; the documented default uses 10 shares across at least 7 servers and can recover from any 3. A gateway checks integrity and ignores corrupted shares. Files can be immutable or mutable, with read-only or read-write access for mutable files and directories. The gateway gives access through HTTP(S) and SFTP, and a REST-style Web API supports programmatic operations. Users can run a gateway or operate a full grid of storage nodes and an introducer. Installation is documented for Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD. The software is available under GNU GPL version 2 or later, or the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence version 1.0 or later. It is free at free. The public test grid is for experimentation, not reliable or large-scale storage.