Topic of strategic importance

The biggest issue you’d have with using Tardigrade as a file store for public, hot content is that it’s unlikely to actually save money on transfer fees. This is because there is no public HTTP endpoint that serves files from Tardigrade (as far as I know), so anyone wanting to use it as a host for publicly-downloadable content needs to stand up a proxy server that fetches the data from Tardigrade and then serves it to the downloader.

This server would obviously need enough resources to handle whatever scale of downloads it needs to, and there would likely be additional egress charges from whatever hosting service provides the server. You’d be paying for egress twice.

If one can require JavaScript to download content then this could work by running a Tardigrade client directly in the browser, though I don’t think this is an option yet (it is under development).

So Tardigrade basically has a subset of S3-type use cases. There is no “static web hosting” option like on S3, so it’s limited to circumstances under which you want to store massive amounts of data and fetch it yourself – data warehouse, backup, and archival workloads would be the most fitting, I imagine.

I fear we won’t see the lucrative “egress-hungry” type of workloads unless Storj sets up some HTTP servers for hosting static content, or some of the popular CDNs (CloudFront, Fastly, etc.) offer a Tardigrade integration.

3 Likes