Nice to see this idea written about in detail. I had thought about it in the context of terrible availability bargain bucket storage (iDrive E2), where the cost

Nice to see this idea written about in detail. I had thought about it in the context of terrible availability bargain bucket storage (iDrive E2), where the cost of (3,2) erasure coding an object and distributing each segment to one of 3 regions would still be dramatically lower than paying for more expensive and more reliable storage. Say 1 chunk lives in Germany, Ireland and the US each. Client races GETs to all 3 regions and cancels the request to the slowest to respond (which may also be down). Final client latency is equivalent to that of the 2nd slowest region, with substantially better availability due to the ability to tolerate any single region being down Still wouldn't recommend using E2 for anything important, but ^ was one potential approach to dealing with its terribleness. It still doesn't address the reality of when E2 regions go down, it is often for days and reportedly sometimes weeks at a time. So reliable writing in this scenario would necessitate some kind of queue with capacity for weeks of storage There are variants of this scheme where you could potentially balance the horrible reliability storage with some expensive reliable storage as part of the same system, but I never got that far in thinking about how it would work