Longterm business viability of storj

That’s why I put worse in quotes. It is worse because it lacks the certification despite better technical specifications and therefore does not attract the customers that we all have hoped for. That’s bad because I don’t believe there will be less certification requirements in the future but more.

You mean for Storj? Let me ask then: Once the commercial network is established and certified, what costs would incur for Storj to move the data of a customer from the public to the commercial network? Certification cost are not per customer or per Petabyte, at least that’s my understanding, correct me if I am wrong. So there is what I am saying: With the commercial network established and certified, there is no additional cost for Storj and therefore they could in theory freely choose to store customer data on the commercial network. In which case they would pay less to commercial node operators than to a public node operator and therefor they would earn more.

If these a separate networks, then for egress from SNO from the public network and the egress from the repair workers to a different network. It’s also likely will require to spin-up more nodes in different datacenters to put that data.
Perhaps the certification is not a life-spand, and need to be prolonged (I’m not a lawyer).

Certification could also have a per-customer price to do a paperwork, I do not have details.

At the moment this migration doesn’t look for me like a simple process, may be I’m mistaken.
So I’m not convinced that public network would be a less attractive, but the future will show.

If they really move the data like I have written. Of course they could also put that customer onto the commercial network right from the start. But even if they move they data, these are onetime costs compared to monthly reduced cost for storage.

This should not affect what they pay per TB to commercial operators.

From what I have read it is yearly. But these are upfront cost that are required anyway to keep the certificate.

That is not my understanding how it works. But I don’t know it. But from reading about Wasabi it does not sound that they have massive additional cost or paperwork for every single customer and they have a hell of certificates.

From the Github it sounds very easy: Release-v1.86 Test SOC2 upload vs non SOC2 upload · Issue #6184 · storj/storj · GitHub

Upload files to a non SOC2 compliant bucket. Make the bucket SOC2 compliant after the upload. Repair should move all pieces to SOC2 compliant nodes.

We will see. To early to speculate.

Please be careful with quoting my testcases. My expecation might differ a lot from the actual implementation.

In general it is not possible to change a placement restriction after a file was uploaded. However there was one bigger customer that requested us to add a placement restricting after uploading a lot of data. That was bad news for us because this is an expensive repair task and we needed some additional code changes to make that possible.

Now my test case is just questioning if these additional code changes would also work for SOC2 data. I would say there is a 50/50 chance that this test case will fail. In that case I will just report back to the company that in general we can’t change placement restrictions after uploading files. We implemented one exception from that general rule but for SOC2 data that exception doesn’t work. It is simply impossible for SOC2 data at the moment. Further code changes would be needed if a customer ever requests that. Non of the current customers needs that feature → we could still deploy it like that. My goal is to have an answer for the day someone asks.

Sure I would prefer the other outcome. If my testcase is successful it means we are able to change placement rules of existing data in any direction even if the SOC2 customer doesn’t need it right now.

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Out of curiosity, have you considered charging extra for changing parameters of storage? This should be a no-brainer for many customers, as it would be easy to pay one-time repair costs.