Storj : The What, Why and How?
Before we start the story of Storj, we have to first understand a few other stories.
I am sure that every single one of us use some form of cloud storage, be it file storage solutions like Box or Dropbox among many others, or even enterprise offerings from large cloud storage providers like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) , Azure Storage or Google Cloud Storage.
With widespread adoption and usage of these enterprise cloud providers, undeniably of which Amazon S3 has a big slice of the pie, many users are using these providers for their website storage.
Lets focus solely on Amazon S3 here shall we? Straight from the lion's mouth, we have this statement
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is object storage with a simple web service interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web.
It is designed to deliver 99.999999999% durability, and scale past trillions of objects worldwide.
With that, we arrive to our first story
The Great Amazon S3 Outage
On February 28 2017 at 17:40pm UTC, some hell hounds were unleashed.
According to a post-mortem released by Amazon , a team member debugging an issue with the S3 billing system executed a command originally intended remove a number of servers related to the billing subsystem. What actually happened was far worse, an incorrect command ended up removing quite a large number of servers related to the index and placement subsystems, which ended up with the crippling of the Amazon S3 API in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region.
To say that few sites were affected would be a super gross understatement. Despite the outage only occurring in one of the many S3 regions, the US-EAST-1 region affected is one of the most popular and busiest regions on S3.
Huge swaths of websites that depending on S3 storage to serve their files went down.
Notable sites affected include Quora, IFTTT and Trello among thousands of other big and small sites.
We're experiencing some downtime related to the AWS issue that's affecting other sites. :(
— TrelloStatus (@TrelloStatus) February 28, 2017
You can follow along at https://t.co/B4M4d9T9Nl
Our site is currently down due to the AWS issue. We're sorry for the inconvenience! Get updates here: https://t.co/07S0lvjf6m pic.twitter.com/r3KCn4kMMO
— IFTTT (@IFTTT) February 28, 2017
For a while, even Amazon's Service Health Dashboard was showing green as it depended on S3 for storage of its health marker graphics. Yes, it depended on the exact US-EAST-1 S3 region that failed.
The dashboard not changing color is related to S3 issue. See the banner at the top of the dashboard for updates.
— Amazon Web Services (@awscloud) February 28, 2017
Of course, sites that pay for cross region replication or those that had files on other regions were not affected. It begs the question, why would I pay more for file replication?
We end this juicy starter to bring to you the main course.
Storj : What is it ?
Storj is a cloud storage solution like Amazon S3, Azure Storage, Google Cloud Storage and many other existing providers out there.
What makes it different and unique from the other storage providers?
Storj is unique because it is an open source decentralized cloud storage solution.
Storj has no central authority in charge of your files, by default, files are encrypted both in transit to Storj nodes and at rest, only you have full control over your own files.
Storj : Why use it ?
With increasing demands from governments to access user data from services like dropbox and many other services (which do not release statistics). Just how sure can we be that our data is not in the prying eyes of any other parties which should not have access to our data?
Storj solves that by having no central authority that can access uploaded files. All renters on the network negotiate contracts on the network independently. Add to the fact that all files uploaded and stored on the Storj network is encrypted, with only the owner of the files having access to the encryption keys, it is near impossible for unauthorized access to your files, unless you somehow publicize your private keys.
Storj is also a lot cheaper than the other enterprise storage solutions.
The most important reason Storj is a strong competitor is that outages like one that happened to Amazon S3 will probably never happen. Each encrypted file is split into shards and distributed to different nodes throughout the network, all shards are also mirrored a few times to other nodes in the network, unless every single node goes down, which is near impossible, there will never be downtime.
Storj : How to use it ?
There are many wonderful tutorials and resources to kick-start. Be it simply sharing your excess storage and bandwidth to gain some remuneration or to develop your own applications, the possibilities are endless.
To get started with development, simply sign up for an account at https://app.storj.io/#/signup, for a limited time, new users get to enjoy a free quota of 25GB space and 25GB bandwidth, so start experimenting away.
To get started with sharing your excess space? Head on to https://storj.io/share.html, many operating systems are supported, there are GUI versions and command line interfaces to choose from too!
If you have any questions or need help, feel free to join the Community Chat
A very nicely written blog post, thank you for sharing it. Since I am using company servers with running backup servers I am not immediately interested in using StorJ. But I am very interested in the "mining side" of the business. Do you happen to know more on the current profitability of renting out your HD space? If it is profitable one could consider buying some old servers on the cheap and put some big HDD's in it.
Well we call people who offer space on the storj network farmers. For now, payments are made monthly using a pretty complicated formula, based on both shared data (data you upload back to the renters), data uploaded to your machine (we call it a node). For now, files are mirrored a few times to other nodes (which isn't paid for now). Farmers are getting about $35USD/TB/month shared currently.
Over time as the network gets more stable and more users, I know that the storj team might implement microtransactions as well as the ability to pay for more mirrors. When that happens, subsidized payments will probably stop and payments would probably be below $5/TB/month since a renter only pays $15/TB/month
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.