Introduction

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

In this chapter, we will set up a multi-node environment consisting of a single Swift proxy server and five Swift storage nodes with a single extra disk at /dev/sdb1 where the object storage will be written. The authentication and authorization will be handled by...