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Three use cases for object storage

Object storage (or object-based storage) is a modern approach to storing and retrieving data, which is being used more and more often by current applications. A typical use case is storing backups: Backups can, for instance, be created (and optionally encrypted) with Duplicity and then stored outside the respective systems. This way they remain available independent of the primary system.

Since the object storage is being accessed using HTTP/HTTPS calls, this leads to another use case almost automatically: Files flagged as "public" (e.g. images or videos) can be accessed directly via a static URL, and can therefore be incorporated into websites or HTML newsletters without burdening the web server.

If you are already using Docker on your servers, your deployment will become even easier: Entire Docker images can be stored directly on our new object storage using the Docker registry.

Supported tools

Objects stored in the object storage are often files, grouped in "buckets". These in turn can be seen as a simplified version of folders. Hence, usage in the shell or scripts is pretty straightforward: The open source tool s3cmd for example follows familiar concepts to manage objects, similar to SCP or FTP.

Besides the aforementioned Duplicity, an increasing number of modern applications can make use of object storage directly, such as Apache Hadoop or various content management systems such as Drupal and Wordpress.

Participating in closed beta

Before making this new feature accessible to everyone, we would like to invite a limited number of users to test our object storage extensively. Feedback will of course be considered as part of the further development.

Would you like to be among the first to test our object storage? We are looking forward to learning about your experience and are happy to provide you with beta access – a short email will do.

Ready to listen!
Your cloudscale.ch team