Torus: A distributed storage system by CoreOS
It&#x27;s hard to take this seriously:  storage is an excruciatingly hard problem, yet this cheerful description of a nascent and aspirational effort seems blissfully unaware of how difficult it is to even just reliably get bits to and from stable storage, let alone string that into a distributed system that must make CAP tradeoffs.  There is not so much of a whisper as to what the data path actually looks like other than &quot;the design includes the ability to support [...] Reed-Solomon error correction in the near future&quot; -- and the fact that such an empty system hails itself as pioneering an unsolved problem in storage is galling in its ignorance of prior work (much of it open source).<p>Take it from someone who has been involved in both highly durable local filesystems[1] and highly available object storage systems[2][3]:  this is such a hard, nasty problem with so many dark, hidden and dire failure modes, that it takes <i>years</i> of running <i>in production</i> to get these systems to the level of reliability and operability that the data path demands.  Given that (according to the repo, though not the breathless blog entry) its creators &quot;do not recommend its use in production&quot;, Torus is -- in the famous words of Wolfgang Pauli -- not even wrong.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dtrace.org&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;bmc&#x2F;2008&#x2F;11&#x2F;10&#x2F;fishworks-now-it-can-be-told&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dtrace.org&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;bmc&#x2F;2008&#x2F;11&#x2F;10&#x2F;fishworks-now-it-can-...</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dtrace.org&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;bmc&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;25&#x2F;manta-from-revelation-to-product&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dtrace.org&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;bmc&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;25&#x2F;manta-from-revelation...</a><p>[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dtrace.org&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;dap&#x2F;2013&#x2F;07&#x2F;03&#x2F;fault-tolerance-in-manta&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dtrace.org&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;dap&#x2F;2013&#x2F;07&#x2F;03&#x2F;fault-tolerance-in-ma...</a>