MayaNAS presented objbacker.io at the 2025 OpenZFS Developer Summit, introducing a native ZFS VDEV for object storage. By bypassing FUSE entirely, the technology achieves 3.7 GB/s read throughput directly from S3, GCS, and Azure Blob Storage. This presentation marked a significant technical contribution to the community, demonstrating that kernel-level integration with cloud storage is both practical and performant for demanding production environments.

Traditional cloud NAS setups rely on FUSE-based tools like s3fs, which introduce heavy overhead by forcing every I/O operation through multiple context switches. MayaNAS solves this by mapping ZFS blocks directly to cloud objects via a userspace daemon, eliminating the kernel-userspace boundary penalty. This architecture allows metadata to live on local NVMe while large sequential data streams from cheap object storage, creating a high-performance, two-tier system.

The result is a hybrid storage platform that combines local speed with cloud economics. Benchmarks on AWS instances showed 3.7 GB/s sequential reads and 2.5 GB/s writes by striping across six S3 buckets. MayaScale, their NVMe-oF block storage solution, also debuted with sub-millisecond latency. Together, these tools offer a multi-cloud alternative to expensive block storage like EBS and Azure Premium SSDs.

Looking ahead, the industry is watching for the OpenZFS YouTube release of the full 50-minute technical deep dive. The project suggests a shift toward native cloud integration in filesystem design, moving beyond the long-standing debate over filesystems on object stores. Expect wider adoption as enterprises seek to cut storage costs without sacrificing performance.