JanusGraph represents information as entities and the relationships connecting them. Applications can follow those connections to answer questions that are awkward to express as isolated record lookups, making it useful for relationship-heavy datasets. The graph service depends on configured storage and, where needed, indexing backends rather than being a complete durable database in one container. Choosing those backends is part of designing how the graph handles updates, queries and recovery.
Current guidance
JanusGraph is a graph database accessed through its Gremlin-compatible server and clients. Its upstream installation guide provides a container for a simple server, while its storage documentation describes separately configured storage backends. A successful single-container example is not evidence that a distributed production graph has durable and consistent storage.
Choose the storage backend and any mixed-index backend together with the JanusGraph and client versions. Review the selected backend’s transaction and consistency behavior against requirements such as unique identifiers and concurrent graph updates. Capacity planning must include edge and vertex data, indexes and query workload; adding application pods does not automatically fix an undersized backend.
Before an upgrade or migration, test representative traversals, index creation or rebuilding, and recovery from a backend interruption. Protect Gremlin and management access, and keep an independently recoverable copy of authoritative graph data. Coordinate backup and restore with the relevant indexes so restored queries do not silently omit results. The historical scale claims are not benchmarks for a proposed Kubernetes topology, and this review does not certify a particular backend combination.
Historical upstream link check · 2026-10-09
The recorded upstream address redirects to https://janusgraph.org/ and returned HTTP 200 on 2026-10-09. Link availability does not certify the historical installation instructions or current security support.
Website availability is separate from project, chart and image support. Use the current guidance and primary sources on this page to assess the distribution.
Historical Kubedex content
Preserved for context. Commands, versions, prices and results below reflect the original research.
JanusGraph is a highly scalable graph database optimized for storing and querying large graphs with billions of vertices and edges distributed across a multi-machine cluster. JanusGraph is a transactional database that can support thousands of concurrent users, complex traversals, and analytic graph queries.
In addition, JanusGraph provides the following features:
- Elastic and linear scalability for a growing data and user base.
- Data distribution and replication for performance and fault tolerance.
- Multi-datacenter high availability and hot backups.
- Support for ACID and eventual consistency.
Support for various storage backends:
- Apache Cassandra®
- Apache HBase®
- Google Cloud Bigtable
- Oracle BerkeleyDB
Support for global graph data analytics, reporting, and ETL through integration with big data platforms:
- Apache Spark™
- Apache Giraph™
- Apache Hadoop®
Support for geo, numeric range, and full-text search via:
- ElasticSearch™
- Apache Solr™
- Apache Lucene®
Native integration with the Apache TinkerPop™ graph stack:
- Gremlin graph query language
- Gremlin graph server
- Gremlin applications
- Open source under the Apache 2 license
You can visualize graphs stored in JanusGraph via any of the following tools:
- Cytoscape
- Gephi plugin for Apache TinkerPop
- Graphexp
- KeyLines by Cambridge Intelligence
- Linkurious
- The Benefits of JanusGraph
JanusGraph is designed to support the processing of graphs so large that they require storage and computational capacities beyond what a single machine can provide. Scaling graph data processing for real time traversals and analytical queries is JanusGraph’s foundational benefit. This section will discuss the various specific benefits of JanusGraph and its underlying, supported persistence solutions.
General JanusGraph Benefits
- Support for very large graphs. JanusGraph graphs scale with the number of machines in the cluster.
- Support for very many concurrent transactions and operational graph processing. JanusGraph’s transactional capacity scales with the number of machines in the cluster and answers complex traversal queries on huge graphs in milliseconds.
- Support for global graph analytics and batch graph processing through the Hadoop framework.
- Support for geo, numeric range, and full-text search for vertices and edges on very large graphs.
- Native support for the popular property graph data model exposed by Apache TinkerPop.
- Native support for the graph traversal language Gremlin.
- Easy integration with the Gremlin Server for programming language agnostic connectivity.
- Numerous graph-level configurations provide knobs for tuning performance.
- Vertex-centric indices provide vertex-level querying to alleviate issues with the infamous supernode problem.
- Provides an optimized disk representation to allow for efficient use of storage and speed of access.
- Open source under the liberal Apache 2 license.
Benefits of JanusGraph with Apache Cassandra
- cassandra-small
- Continuously available with no single point of failure.
- No read/write bottlenecks to the graph as there is no master/slave architecture.
- Elastic scalability allows for the introduction and removal of machines.
- Caching layer ensures that continuously accessed data is available in memory.
- Increase the size of the cache by adding more machines to the cluster.
- Integration with Apache Hadoop.
- Open source under the liberal Apache 2 license.
Benefits of JanusGraph with HBase
- hbase_logo
- Tight integration with the Apache Hadoop ecosystem.
- Native support for strong consistency.
- Linear scalability with the addition of more machines.
- Strictly consistent reads and writes.
- Convenient base classes for backing Hadoop MapReduce jobs with HBase tables.
- Support for exporting metrics via JMX.
- Open source under the liberal Apache 2 license
Sources & further reading
Spotted something that needs another look?
Help improve this page →