A distributed storage system stores a storage volume as segments that are allocated as needed and assigned VSIDs according to a monotonically increasing counter. The storage volume may be provisioned by an orchestration layer that manages the storage volumes as well as containers executing executable components of the storage volume. A storage volume may be stored across multiple tiers with a storage node managing on which tier a segment is stored based on a volume tier policy and usage of the segments. The tiering policy may be used to relocate the entire storage volume to a tier, such as a cloud computing platform, after which an application may be restored on the tier. Segments on a tier with built in redundancy may be used as both primary and backup copies.