What does "cloud native" mean here? To me it suggests purpose built much as Torus was /is - though the OpenEBS engineers are asserting there are really only two "container native" storage solutions going, their open source project and PortWorx. https://medium.com/@kiranmova/persistent-storage-for-contain...

As with all buzzwords, it means what people want it to mean. Many people say that cloud-native apps should use only ephemeral storage (probably because they don't provide reliable storage).

Of course people want it, but can they have it? The world has yet to see a successful distributed block project.

"Of course people want it, but can they have it?"

Why not? Block storage is a weird beast, targeting legacy apps unable to run in multiple data centers. The same apps are also likely to be willing to lose some of the most recent data in case of a data center outage and trade this for performance, so the barrier is already low. The storage might only need consensus somewhere close by, where latency is very good and the network capacity is huge. Nodes in other data centers could receive data asynchronously (otherwise write latency is going to render the whole thing useless anyway). The question is whether there really are billions to be paid for something that ultimately cannot do well compared to proper distributed solutions.