ABOUT
The project, the person behind it, and the philosophy.
Anish Mulay
Creator & Maintainer
I built Sandstore because I couldn't find a hands-on way to learn distributed systems. Everything was abstract or theoretical. Sandstore provides a real, working distributed file system with Raft consensus, file chunking, and metadata replication. All implemented with clean, readable Go code that you can actually understand and modify.
Actively developed. 386 commits. Last updated March 2026.
Project Vision
Sandstore is a modular framework for building and experimenting with distributed storage architectures. Define your components, swap implementations freely, and explore how fundamental design decisions change the behavior of your system. Whether you are building file or object storage, whether metadata is colocated or separated, the framework stays the same. Spin up a real cluster in minutes with Docker and Kubernetes.
The next step is a second reference topology: a GFS-style disaggregated architecture with dedicated metadata servers and separate data nodes. After that, a FUSE client, additional placement strategies, and tooling that makes it easier for researchers to define and test new topologies without writing infrastructure from scratch.
The Philosophy
Get Involved
Sandstore is open source and actively developed. Whether you are exploring distributed systems for the first time or want to contribute a new topology implementation, there is a place for you here.