pThe advent of Big Data analytics and cloud computing has resulted in an unprecedented increase in the demand for distributed data storage demand. Companies are constantly on the lookout for ways of reducing this cost and improving reliability. Erasure coding has emerged as a promising technique to achieve these goals and most major tech companies have adopted it. However, one major issue in such systems is the characterization and optimization of access latency when data objects are erasure coded in distributed storage. pp ppIn this monograph, the authors provide a review of recent theoretical and practical progress on systems that employ erasure codes for distributed storage. Starting with an overview the key challenges and research problems, the authors give an overview of different models and approaches that have been developed to quantify latency of erasure-coded storage. They also extend the discussions to video streaming from erasure-coded distributed storage systems. Practical