Chapter 8. Cloud Storage: object storage
This chapter covers
- What is object storage?
- What is Cloud Storage?
- Interacting with Cloud Storage
- Access control and lifecycle configuration
- Deciding whether Cloud Storage is a good fit
If you’ve ever built an application that involves storing an image (such as a user’s profile photo), you’ve run into the problem of deciding where to put that photo. Chances are that to keep making progress on your project, you went with the easiest place: right in your database or on your local filesystem. This works for a little while, but if your website becomes popular, the disk that holds all of these images and videos might get overwhelmed. This is the exact problem that object storage services aim to solve.
In addition to storing data correctly, a primary design goal of these systems is to reduce complexity of the underlying disks and data centers and instead provide a simple API for uploading and retrieving files, a bit like key-value storage for large values with automatic replication and caching around the world.
Of all the cloud services that exist today, object storage tends to be one of the most common and most standardized. For example, Google Cloud Storage and Amazon S3 have the same concepts and are capable of speaking the same XML API. Although object storage systems share many similarities, they tend to have slight differences in the pricing model, replication strategy, or storage class.