Curve is a high‑performance, easy‑to‑operate, cloud‑native open‑source distributed storage system (CNCF Sandbox) that provides block and file storage for OpenStack, Kubernetes, and PolarFS, featuring Raft‑based consistency, hybrid storage, high availability, and an ongoing roadmap for AI and other workloads.
This article explores the classic catenary curve—its definition, historical development, and mathematical derivation—while examining whether it can model a kite’s string under wind, highlighting the assumptions of the model and suggesting more realistic approaches such as advanced derivations or simulation.
In this interview, NetEase’s Curve project lead Wang Pan explains the architecture, block and file storage services, performance advantages over Ceph, management modules, ongoing CPU and I/O optimizations, deployment tooling, and the open‑source roadmap that positions Curve as a high‑performance, cloud‑native storage solution.
Facing Ceph’s high latency, jitter, and upgrade constraints, NetEase Cloud Music adopted Curve block storage, which delivers over twice the IOPS, sub‑2‑second upgrade pauses, and stable, low‑latency I/O across 40 GB‑4 TB volumes, enabling the platform to meet its 99.99% availability SLA for billions of users while supporting future cloud‑native services.
CURVE is NetEase's open‑source, high‑performance, highly available distributed storage platform that supports block, object, and cloud‑native database use cases, emphasizing simple solutions, hardware‑software integration, and extensive open‑source component reuse.
