[harshaw]

Sounds more like an object system (immutable) with the veneer of a file system for their use cases. I sort of read the doc - sounds like data is replicated and not erasure encoded (so perhaps more expensive?).

I think many people have said this, but "file systems" get a lot easier if you don't have to worry about overwrites, appends, truncates, etc. Anyway, always interesting to see what people come up with for their use cases.

[rostayob]

We do use Reed-Solomon codes, as the blog post explains.

[Balinares]

Append-only is pretty much the only way to do robust replicated storage at scale, else you get into scenarios where, instead of a given logical block having two possible states (either existing somewhere or not existing anywhere), the block can exist with multiple values at different times, including an unbounded number of invalid ones, for instance in case a client died halfway through a block mutation. Immutability is just plain a very strong invariant.

It also does not at all preclude implementing a read-write layer on top of it, for instance with a log-structured FS design. That's however the solution to a problem these people are, it seems, not having.