Adoption & Ecosystem
Who uses it
The repository keeps an ADOPTERS.md file with a production and testing split. The named adopters below all come from that file (S1) or from CNCF's graduation announcement (S3).
| Organisation | Use case | Source |
|---|---|---|
| JD.com | In production since 2018: 3000+ workloads, 50+ PB, 5000+ servers; ads, search, AI training | ADOPTERS.md |
| OPPO | Backend storage for a Kubernetes-based AI platform | ADOPTERS.md |
| NetEase (网易) | Backend for Elasticsearch, 2+ PB | ADOPTERS.md |
| Meizu, BEIKE, LinkSure, Reconova, BIGO, Vipshop | Listed under production | ADOPTERS.md |
| Xiaomi, Shopee, CreditEase, TD Tech | Listed in production or testing tables | ADOPTERS.md |
At graduation CNCF reported over 200 organizations using CubeFS and about 350 PB under management as of January 2025 (S3, S4).
Adoption signals
- GitHub: 5,593 stars and 703 forks (gh API, 2026-06-22).
- Contributors: the GitHub contributors API paginated to 127 (about 127 accounts, 2026-06-22). CNCF reports a separate count growing from 27 to 379 contributors across 42 companies (S3, S4).
- Organizations: CNCF states adoption grew from roughly 10 to over 200 across the Sandbox-to-graduation period (S3).
- Releases: latest is v3.5.3, dated 2025-12-23 (S10).
Ecosystem
- CSI driver:
cubefs/cubefs-csi, a separate sub-project repo (S1). - Helm chart:
cubefs/cubefs-helm, a separate sub-project repo (S1). - Client surfaces: S3 SDKs through ObjectNode, Hadoop FileSystem, and POSIX FUSE.
- Observability: Prometheus metrics through
util/exporter.
Alternatives
CubeFS is compared directly with Ceph in its origin paper, which benchmarks metadata operations against CephFS and RADOS (S7). Other systems in the same space:
| Alternative | Differs by |
|---|---|
| Ceph (CephFS/RADOS) | Unified object, block, and file with CRUSH placement; the SIGMOD baseline CubeFS measured against (S7) |
| MinIO | S3 object storage only; no POSIX or HDFS file semantics |
| JuiceFS | POSIX file system that keeps metadata in an external database rather than in-memory B-Trees |
| Alluxio | A caching and data-orchestration layer over existing stores, not a primary store |
| HDFS | The HDFS-compatible API CubeFS offers is meant to let it stand in for HDFS |
The distinctions that matter: CubeFS serves file and object in one system and lets a volume choose multi-replica or erasure coding; it keeps metadata in memory and places it by memory usage, which it argues avoids rebalancing on capacity growth (S7); and the Master stays off the data path.