We are excited to welcome the first developers onto the new Tardigrade decentralized cloud storage network! As part of our Vanguard alpha, developers will now be able to upload data in a truly distributed, secure and cost-effective way, without sacrificing performance, resilience or uptime.
A primary goal of ours has been to give our developers and community members a simple and straightforward experience when storing data on the network. A lot of effort went towards making it very easy to begin storing data on the Tardigrade network, Storj’s Satellites that are backed by service level agreements (SLAs). Our community of developers (as well as our own experiences) have told us that starting up a project on many of the existing, legacy cloud storage services is extremely complicated. Our goal is to take the good, familiar parts of current storage services—from the same CLI commands to the better parts of other web dashboards—and turn them into a truly simple cloud storage service.
We redesigned our network from the ground up to emphasize simplicity and ease of integration for developers interfacing with the network. A significant part of the straight-forward experience is our Tardigrade Satellite web interface, which acts as our storage web dashboard. It provides an intuitive web experience to our developers for managing projects, user access, API keys, and billing.
Selecting a Satellite
Selecting a Satellite is where the experience begins. It’s a bit of a different onboarding experience than you’re used to, but here’s a simple way to think about it.
Selecting a Satellite is kind of like selecting a data center region. You select a certain region for purposes such as performance and latency. The same goes for a Satellite. Tardigrade Satellites come with guaranteed SLAs and high-reputation storage nodes. In the future, there may be Satellites that are not Tardigrade Certified, as all Storj software is open source. Selecting a Tardigrade Satellite provides users with the reassurance that their data is safe.
The main difference between Satellites and data centers is that Satellites do not store any actual user data. Instead, they keep track of your files and projects, maintain reliability and redundancy of files, and manage access to projects and files.
We will have three Tardigrade Satellites to start. These Satellites will come with guaranteed SLAs. In the future, Storj will operate more Satellites, along with other members from our open source community. [Read more about Tardigrade Satellites in our blog from a few days ago](https://storj.io/blog/2019/04/introducing-tardigrade
