Object Storage and Amazon S3 Compatible Storage
Ceph Object Storage is an object storage interface built on top of librados and provides a RESTful gateway for applications to the Ceph Storage Cluster. Ceph Object Storage supports two interfaces:
S3 compatible: Provides object storage capabilities, and its interface is compatible with most of the Amazon S3 RESTful API.
Swift compatible: Provides object storage functionality, and its interface is compatible with most of the OpenStack Swift API.
Ceph RADOS Object Storage
The Ceph Object Storage
Object storage is a type of data storage where each data unit is stored as a discrete unit called an object such as pdf, audio, image, or video files. These objects can be any type and size of data. All objects are stored in the object storage with flat namespace instead of the folder with hierarchical architecture.
Compare to the file type and block type storage, the object storage provides much more comprehensive metadata for describing objects. Metadata helps you to understand and analyze large files without having to deal directly with the contents in the file.
Benefits of object storage
- Easier Access: Object storage is driven by metadata, and with this level of classification for each data, you can quickly sort and search your files.
- Unlimited Storage: Object storage is scalable. There is no limitation on its size.
- Reduce Costs: Due to the scale-out nature of object storage, the cost of storing data is lower.
- Resource Optimization: Because of object storage doesn't have the file hierarchy, and its metadata is fully customizable. There are far fewer hardware restrictions compared to file or block storage.
Object storage use cases
-
There are multiple use cases for object storage, including:
- Rich Media: Utilize the industry-leading solutions for managing unstructured data and reduce the cost of global rich media distribution.
- Manage distributed content: Optimize data value throughout the lifecycle and provide competitive storage services.
- Internet of Things (IoT): Efficiently manage machine-to-machine data, support artificial intelligence and analytics, and reduce the cost and time of the design process.
Object Storage Metadata
- Deploy RADOS Gateway on Ceph and SUSE Enterprise Storage
- Photo Set
- RADOS Gateways
- S3/Swift users