Erasure code saves storage space and increases durability. Most commonly used in its simplest form (RAID5), erasure code is generalized for networked storage. It was first introduced in Ceph with the Firefly release in 2014. In this session, we’ll explain, with a lively experiment, the erasure code logic. We’ll give you an overview of the Ceph implementation and its most common use cases and go on to explain the various erasure code plug-ins (jerasure, ISA-L, LRC). Finally, we’ll show you how to estimate the trade off between erasure coding and replication—a choice that comes down to space versus speed.