Introduction – OpenStack Object Storage

OpenStack Object Storage, also known as Swift, is the service that allows for massively scalable and highly redundant storage on commodity hardware. This service is implemented by Rackspace as Cloud Files, and it is also analogous to Amazon's S3 storage service and managed in a similar way under OpenStack. With OpenStack Object Storage, we can store many objects of virtually unlimited size—restricted only by the available hardware—and grow our environment as needed, to accommodate our storage. The highly redundant nature of OpenStack Object Storage is ideal for archiving data (such as logs and backup archives) as well as for providing a storage system that OpenStack Compute can use for virtual machine instance images.

The architecture of OpenStack Object Storage is straightforward. There is the API service that runs on the controller nodes. Then there are Swift proxy services that can either be deployed onto the controller nodes, or separated onto their...