Interesting approach from Filebase

Filebase, a young decentralized storage player, just joined The IT Press Tour and we had the opportunity to discover an ingenious way to attach cloud storage to users and applications.

The company founded in 2019 in Boston with $2M raised develops a decentralized cloud storage aggregator that unifies various storage network back-ends. Let's dig a bit in this technology with a historical timeline.

We all remember some P2P services like Gnutella, Napster or even BitTorrent that implemented a similar mechanism. We also saw some dispersed tentatives with players like Cleversafe for enterprises or Wuala, Symform, AetherStore or Kerstor for SOHOs or individuals. These players have introduced a trade model where local space is exchanged with remote one giving additional redundancy thanks to the geo distribution of data and additional parities.

At the same cloud storage appears as a multi point access exposing a http-based API. Beyond AWS, Azure and GCP seen as centralized offering at least in one availability zone, some ideas appeared at different time to extend P2P model with some advanced distributed technologies and blockchain-based solutions like Storj, Sia, Blockade or Arweave.

These storage networks can be used with some special APIs but also with some technology aggregator such Filebase that finally exposes a S3 compatible API that masks the complexity of each network. Thus users who use classic cloud storage can migrate to these decentralized model with really minimal changes but great gains.

Filebase offers a sort of cloud routing gateway that directs and routes traffic to the right storage network behind. Each of these networks offers protection with some advanced erasure coding techniques but it doesn't exit across network. To do that a second API request has to be made to send a second copy to the second network and thus creates even more redundancy and geo dispersed data. So far Filebase supports Storj, Sia and Skynet and plan to add a few more in the coming months such Filecoin, Arweave or IPFS. Filebase wishes to add the S3 object lock feature to address archive or long term preservation needs and also some CDN capabilities for read-only or static data.

In terms of pricing, Filebase is free for 5GB and offers a flat fee above with $5.99/TB/month.

I recently interviewed Joshua Noble, CEO of Filebase, for The French Storage Podcast, you can listen to the episode directly from the site here or from your preferred podcast platform.