Storj Labs today announced general availability of its decentralized Tardigrade cloud storage service. Storj, pronounced “storage,” aptly named its platform after one of nature's smallest – and arguably cutest – pioneers to colonize new environments, which are also known to be virtually indestructible.

And much like the tardigrades that are believed to be among the first animals to have left the ocean and settle on dry land, Ben Golub, CEO and chairman of Storj Labs, said his company has emerged to deliver the world’s first decentralized cloud storage service with enterprise-grade durability, performance, and reliability. 

Since the beta launch of Tardigrade last fall, Golub said that it has focused on refining the user experience. “Our goal was to build a cloud storage service that is actually simple,” he explained. 

The company has been working to onboard users, release integrations, and test the network with several thousand users, storage node operators, and a limited number of larger partners and companies. 

It can be difficult to locate a system of record — or where whole sets of data live — when it’s distributed across multiple locations, which often fragments the data. To address this, Storj uses a deliberate erasure coding process that creates redundancy.

Erasure coding isn’t a new technology. In a deliberate and managed process, files are split into 80 pieces and sprinkled into storage nodes. Of the 80 pieces, only 30 are needed to retrieve the files. In a previous interview, Goulab explained that “what sounds like fragmenting the data is actually a very tightly managed process that is audited and tracked so we always know where those ad pieces are.”

Golub has called it the “magic” behind the platform’s durability and redundancy. 

The GA release also includes new integrations with a handful of popular developer tools and open source software platforms. These include FileZilla, MongoDB, MariaDB, Pydio, NextCloud, Zenko, InfluxData, and CPanel. Other integrations include CNCTED, Fluree, Verif-y, and Kafkaesque.

Also included on the platform is an array of bindings for developers using Go, Android, C, .NET/Xamarin, Node.js, Swift, and Python to natively integrate with Tardigrade.

In 2018 Storj took an aggressive step toward monetizing and diversifying the cloud storage space with the launch of its open source partner program. The model diverted revenues from its decentralized cloud storage platform to companies and individuals willing to house data on their computing systems. 

Program partners receive a cut of the revenue when end-users of their software store data on the Storj platform. The program also allows partners to generate revenue if an existing Storj user deploys a partner’s open source software. That revenue is tied to incremental storage and bandwidth usage.

The Storj service is compatible with Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Simple Cloud Storage Service (S3) and can also run on any of the other major public clouds including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. It only requires a couple lines of code to switch from storing on centralized platforms.

“We’ve demonstrated several months of steadily improving metrics, completed third-party security audits, and passed a rigorous set of launch gates. We can now confidently say that the network is resilient, performant, secure, and ready for broad adoption,” Golub added.