Erasure coding not replication

10 data shards + 4 parity shards. Can lose any 4 shards, recover. More storage-efficient than 3x replication (1.4x vs 3x overhead).

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Erasure coding not replication

10 data shards + 4 parity shards. Can lose any 4 shards, recover. More storage-efficient than 3x replication (1.4x vs 3x overhead).

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Multi-AZ placement

Shards distributed across 3+ AZs. Whole AZ can fail — object still retrievable.

Index at scale

bucket/key → shard locations mapped in Index Service. Petabytes of index. Sharded + replicated. Fast lookup by prefix.

Continuous repair

Bit rot happens. Repair service scans shards, verifies checksums, replaces bad ones. Silent healing.

Storage classes as lifecycle

Standard → IA → Glacier → Deep Archive. Auto-transition via lifecycle rules. Trade retrieval latency for cost.