The Filesystem Is the API (with TigerFS)

What if the filesystem was backed by a real database?

Most databases persist data to disk, but the underlying files are usually opaque: binary blobs, internal formats, encrypted pages. You cannot just open a file, edit a few lines, and expect the database state to change.

But using the filesystem itself as the source of truth can be surprisingly powerful.

For my personal blog, I use Hugo. Articles are just Markdown files in a Git repository. In a way, that already behaves like a tiny database: posts have authors, tags, metadata, version history, collaboration via Git.

$ tree

├── about.md
├── an-ode-to-logging.md
├── benchmark-grpc-protobuf-vs-http-json.md
├── books-2025.md
├── building-slack-bot-with-go.md
├── centrally-collecting-events-in-go-microservices.md
├── concurrency-data-race.md

It is simple and ergonomic.

But once the number of files grows, searching, indexing, querying, and connecting data becomes painful. Filesystems are not databases.

So the obvious question is:

What if the filesystem was backed by a real database?