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amazon-s3cloudstoragegoogle-cloud-storageobject-storage
Shuklaswag
Shuklaswag

Reputation: 1023

What are some use cases for object storage?

What are some use cases for object storage, as opposed to file systems or block storage (database) systems?

From what I understand, object storage is mostly used for persistent storage for applications running on cloud systems. It seems to have a lot of overlap with file systems, except that the details of how the objects are stored is abstracted away so that apps can access them with simple web queries.

However, I'd love if someone could give examples of applications where this is actually used instead of or alongside the other two storage systems.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1320

Answers (1)

David
David

Reputation: 9731

Some example use cases for object storage:

  • Off-site backups
  • Storing and serving user content (e.g. profile pictures)
  • Storing artifacts (e.g. JAR files, startup scripts) to be deployed to VMs
  • Distributing static content (e.g. video content for your users)
  • Caching intermediate data (e.g. individual frames from a render farm before assembly into output video)
  • Accepting input or providing output to a web service (as accepting data by POST can be difficult/inefficient for large input files).
  • archiving data for regulatory purposes

All these cases might be accompanied by a database to store metadata (ie to find the objects). Actually storing the data in the database would, however, exceed size limits or significantly harm database performance.

These use-cases can be achieved with a file-system, so long as your total usage can be handed by a single machine. If you have more traffic than that you will need replicated storage, load balancing etc, at which point you are effectively implementing a object storage system yourself.

Upvotes: 5

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