1.0.0-beta-8

⚠️ Clean install required — do not upgrade in place

beta-8 replaces both halves of Alarik's storage. There is no migration path from beta-7.

What changed underneath

• Object data is now Reed-Solomon erasure-coded (k data + m parity shards) instead of whole-copy replicated.
• The control plane — users, buckets, access keys, policies, cluster membership — moved out of SQLite/Postgres and into Alarik's own erasure-coded store. There is no external database any more. Any database environment variables are now ignored, and there is no import step from an existing one.

If you point beta-8 at a beta-7 Storage/ directory, it comes up with an empty control plane: no users, no access keys, no buckets. Nothing is reachable even where object files are still on disk. Back up first, deploy fresh, recreate your accounts and access keys, and re-upload.

Other breaking changes

• JWT is now required with --env production. A production node without it refuses to start rather than falling back to the well-known development key. Set it to a strong secret — and to the same value on every node in a cluster.
• Presigned URLs signed with a future date are rejected until that time, matching S3. Previously they worked immediately.
• Access keys now stop working exactly at their expiry instead of up to a minute later.

This is a beta series; breaking changes between betas are expected until 1.0.0.

What's Changed

• Feature/erasure coding by @juliangerhards in #15
• Feature/objects metadata store by @juliangerhards in #18

Full Changelog: 1.0.0-beta-7...1.0.0-beta-8