The architect of JuiceFS is very close to GFS, which use a single node master for many years, even now. Since Redis is only responsible for metadata, a single node can serve hundreds of millions of files, and tens of thousands of IOPS, that should be enough for many use cases.

The term `distributed`, means that JuiceFS is not a `local` file system, or can only be used by single machine. JuiceFS should be qualified as distributed system, even the core part is the client, which could be used by many machines in the same time.