Tigris Data
An S3-compatible, globally distributed object storage platform engineered to optimize small-object workloads through metadata inlining, adjacent key coalescing, and LSM-backed caching, delivering sub-10ms read/write latency for KB-sized payloads.
Summary
An S3-compatible, globally distributed object storage platform engineered to optimize small-object workloads through metadata inlining, adjacent key coalescing, and LSM-backed caching, delivering sub-10ms read/write latency for KB-sized payloads.
An alternative S3-compatible provider positioned between hyperscaler general-purpose storage and specialized caching layers. Addresses the latency and API cost penalty that standard S3 imposes on workloads dominated by millions of small objects such as log aggregations, ML feature stores, and IoT telemetry.
- Not a CDN or cache — it is a durable object store with full S3 API compatibility.
- Small-object optimization does not mean it sacrifices large-object throughput; the architecture handles both.
- Global distribution does not imply eventual consistency for all operations — write consistency is maintained per-region.
implementsS3 API — full S3 compatibility for existing toolingsolvesSmall Files Problem — metadata inlining bypasses per-object storage overheadsolvesRequest Amplification — key coalescing reduces API call volume for adjacent objects
Definition
An S3-compatible, globally distributed object storage platform engineered for small-object workloads. Uses metadata inlining, adjacent key coalescing, and LSM-backed caching to deliver sub-10ms read/write latency for kilobyte-sized payloads.
Standard S3 imposes severe latency and API cost penalties on workloads dominated by millions of small objects (logs, ML feature stores, IoT telemetry). Every object incurs per-request overhead regardless of size. Tigris inlines small payloads directly into the metadata database layer, bypassing the per-object storage overhead entirely.
Low-latency storage for ML feature stores, log aggregation pipelines, IoT telemetry ingestion, and any workload where object sizes are consistently below 1MB.
Recent developments
Source mix note: Tigris Data's recent corpus is heavy on aggregator pricing-comparison content; the bullets below cite multiple independent sources for the pricing data.
- $25M Series A led by Spark Capital, with Andreessen Horowitz participating (October 2025). The round backs the small-object thesis directly: coverage frames Tigris as AI-optimized S3-compatible storage whose LSM-tree caching and automatic regional data placement target workloads dominated by kilobyte-scale files like embeddings — exactly the small-payload profile this platform is engineered for. Per Tigris Data raises $25M for its AI-optimized cloud storage service (SiliconANGLE).
- Deterministic-simulation testing hardened the caching layer against stale reads (April 2026). An engagement with Antithesis surfaced cache-coherence failure modes in the delete-then-read race path of Tigris's metadata-inlined caching architecture; Tigris shipped three independent defenses against stale reads, including eager cache eviction before the FoundationDB delete (performed while holding the key lock) plus a deferred tombstone write. A rare public account of how an S3-compatible provider validates read-path correctness rather than just throughput. Per Antithesis report: Tigris Data.
- Pricing positioning vs Cloudflare R2 — zero egress + versioning + S3 Tables. Per the Mixpeek S3-compatible providers roundup (May 2026), Tigris is priced at $20/TB/mo Standard, $10/TB/mo Infrequent Access, $2/TB/mo Archive with zero egress — slotted as "R2-style zero-egress with versioning and Iceberg/S3 Tables support added." For lakehouse workloads that need cheap durable storage plus the metadata features S3 Standard ships natively, Tigris is positioned as the price-competitive answer.
- Cost-trap framing: egress is still the gotcha. Per LeanOps's "Why Your S3 Bill Is 2-3x the Pricing Page" analysis, a worked example at 100 TB stored + 20 TB monthly egress puts AWS S3 at $4,100+/month versus $1,580 on Cloudflare R2; Tigris is cited as the zero-egress alternative in the same shape. The 2026 framing is consistent across multiple aggregator sources: storage pricing has converged across vendors but egress remains the line item where differentiation actually shows up in the bill.
Connections4
Outbound4
Resources2
Reproducible YCSB benchmarks proving sub-10ms latency for small objects versus AWS S3 and Cloudflare R2, quantifying the metadata inlining advantage.
Official documentation for the globally distributed S3-compatible object storage platform, covering architecture, API compatibility, and deployment patterns.