Implementations disclosed herein include a storage system including a plurality of storage devices, wherein each of the plurality of storage devices includes compute resources, memory resources, and a storage device controller configured to perform application-specific data management operations using the compute resources and the memory resources of the storage device, and a storage system controller configured to distribute a workload across the plurality of storage devices based on a capability of each of the plurality of storage devices during an IDLE state. The capability of each of the plurality of storage devices may be specifications, current availability, and performance history of each of the plurality of storage devices. In some implementations, each of the plurality of storage devices communicate with each other via a peer-to-peer networking communications protocol (e.g., NVme, NVMof, PCIe, Ethernet, etc.).