Storj Labs: Public Alpha V3 Platform to Opening Doors for Developers Interested in Building on Decentralized Cloud Storage

Storj Labs, Inc. announced its V3 platform has entered its public alpha for developers and companies interested in testing this platform on their local hardware.

The company also released its latest white paper, which outlines the architecture and key components behind the upcoming V3 decentralized cloud storage network, which is designed based on learnings from the company’s previous platform and the latest research on decentralized and distributed systems.

The public alpha will enable companies and developers to begin testing the Storj platform, and prepare to build applications that run on decentralized cloud storage. Developers can learn more about the public alpha by visiting the firm’s GitHub, downloading code for the V3 platform, and running the V3 test network on their personal computers. The next stage of the alpha, which is slated for the first part of next year, will enable storage node operators to begin sharing their excess storage capacity with the upcoming network.

“The release of our white paper and launch of the V3 alpha for developers is a major milestone on the road to releasing the new network and the culmination of a massive amount of work from our team. We are very pleased with the results we’ve seen so far from partners who were given early access to the platform,” said JT Olio, director of engineering, Storj. “We look forward to further feedback from community members and other developers, who test the Storj platform and build applications that leverage the benefits of decentralized cloud storage. I also want to thank the people that reviewed and contributed to the whitepaper directly, as well as the projects, research and thought leaders cited in the white paper who have influenced and informed our design.“

The Storj network is designed to scale into the exabyte range and beyond. The platform has prioritized simplicity and horizontal scaling to ensure users can migrate their existing applications to the new platform. With built-in Amazon S3 compatibility, this network can be integrated into applications that currently use cloud storage in a matter of minutes. In most cases, migrations merely require changing a few lines of code. This approach will drive real-world adoption of decentralized cloud storage by lowering the barrier to integrate it into existing platforms. The launch of the public alpha means anyone can test the platform and begin building and experimenting with decentralized storage.

“Having solutions that are compatible and easily integrate as a Plesk Extension is key for our team and the customers,” said Lukas Hertig, SVP, business development and strategic alliances, Plesk International GmbH. “Our software runs on more than 380,000 servers across 3,000-plus hosting providers and all hyperscale cloud platforms, supporting over 11 million websites worldwide. An easy path to integrate into Plesk eliminates a massive amount of work when enabling new technologies to our customers like the Storj platform.“

The V3 white paper discusses the many design constraints the company’s team took into consideration when designing the new platform. It also outlines a framework of eight components that comprise the overall architecture and explains how they will evolve as the network matures to address additional storage use cases, such as CDN, edge networks, and other storage sub-markets.

“Storj is a well-thought effort at providing storage services beyond the resource scale of the cloud, while retaining industry-grade QoS,” said Petar Maymounkov, CTO, Aljabr, Inc., and author of Kademlia, the widely used DHT technology that is central to V3 network. “It harnesses the resources of decentralization, while addressing decentralized security organically using economic incentives and proof of (useful) work. I am excited to watch this system grow in the wild. It has the potential to set a unique example of how to scale peer-to-peer business architectures.“

With the world expected to annually create 44ZB of data by 2020, and cloud storage prices remaining flat, new solutions like the company’s platform can lower costs by leveraging existing, underutilized HDDs. Decentralized cloud storage can also improve security, availability, and performance when compared to traditional, centralized solutions. It also provides enhanced durability for data stored on the network and is more resistant to bad or unreliable actors, compared to centralized storage.

On top of the benefits the firm’s decentralized cloud storage platform delivers to developers, companies and end-users, it can also help open source companies generate revenue every time their users store data in the cloud. This summer, the company announced an Open Source Partner Program (OSPP) that will use connectors to enable revenue sharing with open source companies when their users leverage the company as their underlying storage platform. OSPP launch partners have been given access to an early version of V3 network and their feedback has been a critical to refining the platform.

Ressources :
About the alpha and begin testing the Storj platform, or to contribute to the open source Storj project, visit our GitHub repo and follow along with our tutorials.
Storj V3 white paper and white paper executive summary
Blog from JT Olio, director, engineering, introducing the white paper.
Join our Open Source Partner Program and learn more about the open source projects and other companies building on the Storj platform on our partner page, or read our Open Source Mission Statement.