Erasure Coding
Erasure coding is a data protection method used in storage systems and distributed computing to reconstruct lost or corrupted data from redundant pieces. It works by splitting data into fragments, encoding them with redundant parity data, and distributing them across multiple storage nodes. This allows recovery of the original data even if some fragments are lost, providing higher storage efficiency and fault tolerance compared to traditional replication.
Developers should learn erasure coding when designing fault-tolerant storage systems, cloud storage platforms, or distributed databases where data durability and storage efficiency are critical. It is particularly useful in large-scale systems like Hadoop HDFS, object storage (e.g., Ceph, Swift), and content delivery networks, as it reduces storage overhead while maintaining high availability and reliability against node failures.