  Erasure coding has been recognized as a powerful method to mitigate delays
due to slow or straggling nodes in distributed systems. This work shows that
erasure coding of data objects can flexibly handle skews in the request rates.
Coding can help boost the \emph{service rate region}, that is, increase the
overall volume of data access requests that the system can handle. This paper
aims to postulate the service rate region as an important consideration in the
design of erasure-coded distributed systems. We highlight several open problems
that can be grouped into two broad threads: 1) characterizing the service rate
region of a given code and finding the optimal request allocation, and2)
designing the underlying erasure code for a given service rate region. As
contributions along the first thread, we characterize the rate regions of
maximum-distance-separable, locally repairable, and Simplex codes. We show the
effectiveness of hybrid codes that combine replication and erasure coding in
terms of code design. We also discover fundamental connections between
multi-set batch codes and the problem of maximizing the service rate region.
