What is Object Storage – a massive scalable (think exabytes – 1,000 PB) to store unstructured data. Beyond that is the zetabyte (1,000 EB) and the YottaByte (1,000 ZB).
Storing such large amounts of data is problematic for standard file systems, as they were never designed to scale so far.
As far as the end user is concerned Object Storage consists of three things.
An Address, a username and a password.
This is the likes of AWS S3, Azure and Google Cloud have succeeded, it’s simple, provision the storage and off you go. The problems of cost which seems small, start to get out of control as time goes on, with additional costs to retrieve data (egress charges per GB) over time.
Limiting access to Object Stores, requires policies (refer to Blog post here S3 Permissions and Polcies) these can look complicated, but basic polcies are easy.
The changes in the Object Storage market is coming down to how and why they are used, it used to be Archive and Backup, but now it’s more toward primary workloads, and considerations of performance and number of objects as well as scale, are becoming even more important.