In this age, data is expanding faster than ever. In fact, according to Statista, the total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally is projected to reach 182 zettabytes in 2025. This exponential growth is forcing organizations to rethink their data management strategies. Traditional storage solutions are often struggling to keep up with the volume, velocity, and variety of data. Cloud object storage provides a scalable and flexible solution for storing and managing large volumes of unstructured data.
In this guide, we’ll cover the basics of cloud object storage, discuss its benefits, demonstrate its applications, and explain how it differs from other storage solutions.
What Is Cloud Object Storage?
Cloud object storage is a method of storing data where each piece of data is treated as an individual object, distinct from traditional files or blocks. An object can be any type of data, such as images, videos, or documents. Each object comes with metadata, which is information about the data, and a unique ID to identify it. This approach enables storage systems to grow, evolve, and access data more effectively than older systems.
Here's a breakdown of the basic components and how they function:
- Objects: These are the main units of storage. Each object contains the data, metadata, and a unique ID. Metadata includes details such as the content type, creation date, and access permissions.
- Buckets: Objects are stored in buckets, which are like containers or folders that help keep everything organized.
- Metadata: This is crucial for locating and managing data. Unlike other systems that use a hierarchical structure of folders, object storage employs a flat structure with metadata to manage data.
Cloud object storage plays a crucial role in modern data management. It’s a scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solution for storing large volumes of unstructured data. It’s well-suited for cloud-native applications, big data analytics, and content delivery, as it can manage various types of data and provide easy access.
Benefits of Using Cloud Object Storage
In general, cloud object storage provides many key areas considered an advantage when selecting this storage type for modern enterprises:
- Scalability: One of the primary features of cloud object storage is its near-infinite scaling capability. Unlike traditional storage systems that reach their capacity limits, object storage can easily accommodate a wide range of data, making it well-suited for growing businesses with increasing storage needs.
- Cost-effectiveness: Cloud object storage is generally more cost-effective than traditional storage, especially for large volumes of data. Additionally, this form of storage offers a pay-as-you-go model that allows organizations to pay only for the storage they consume.
- Accessibility: Object storage is designed for internet access through application programming interfaces (APIs). This makes it accessible from anywhere in the world, with seamless sharing and collaboration of documents.
- Durability and availability: Cloud object storage providers typically offer high durability and availability, ensuring that data is stored redundantly and is accessible even in the event of hardware failures. For instance, Amazon S3 is designed for 99.999999999% durability.
- Richness of metadata: The highly extended metadata associated with each object enhances data management and retrieval. It allows for more efficient searching, sorting, and analyzing of data, which is particularly helpful in big data applications.
How Cloud Object Storage Works
To understand how cloud storage works, we need to look at it from two perspectives: data storage and data retrieval.
- Storing data:
- When you upload data to a cloud object storage service, it’s broken down into chunks referred to as objects.
- Each object is assigned a unique identifier.
- The object is then stored in a bucket along with its respective metadata.
- The service then distributes the objects across multiple storage nodes to ensure durability and availability.
- Retrieving data:
- To retrieve data, the application or user sends an access request to the object storage service with the use of a unique identifier for that object.
- The service locates the object and returns it to the requester.
APIs here take center stage. Object storage services have APIs to let applications interact or work with the storage system programmatically, making it easy to plug object storage into their applications.
Use Cases for Cloud Object Storage
Cloud object storage's scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness make it suitable for a wide range of use cases across various industries:
- Media and entertainment: Companies in this sector utilize object storage to store and distribute large media files, including videos, images, and audio files.
- Backup and archiving: Object storage offers a cost-effective solution for long-term data retention, including backups and archives. Its durability and scalability make it ideal for storing data that requires preservation for compliance or disaster recovery purposes. Pure Storage® Purity CloudSnap™, for example, integrates with cloud object storage platforms like AWS S3 and Azure Blob Storage for snapshot-based backups, offloading snapshots directly to the cloud.
- Big data analytics: Object storage can store and manage the massive data sets required for big data analytics. Its scalability and metadata capabilities enable efficient data processing and analysis.
- Web and mobile applications: Object storage is often used to store static content for web and mobile applications, such as images, CSS files, and JavaScript files. This can improve application performance by offloading content delivery to the storage service.
- Healthcare: Healthcare organizations use object storage to store medical images, patient records, and other healthcare data. Its security and compliance features help ensure the privacy and security of sensitive information.
Cloud Object Storage vs. Other Storage Solutions
Cloud object storage differs significantly from traditional storage solutions, such as block storage and file storage.
- Block storage: Divides data into uniform-sized blocks, each with a unique identifier. It’s efficient for data that requires frequent, fast updates, such as databases and virtual machines. However, it can be less scalable and more expensive than object storage for large volumes of unstructured data.
- File storage: Organizes data into files and folders, similar to how data is stored on a computer's hard drive. It’s suitable for applications that require a traditional file system interface, such as network file shares. However, it can become complex and less efficient to manage at a large scale.
Here’s how they compare with cloud object storage:
