Object Store in OpenStack–the secret weapon
Or, why swift rocks Swift is the Object Storage component of Openstack. Object Storage is a new paradigm for storage. It’s not files (as in a filesystem) or blocks (as in SCSI variants), but rather Objects. Objects are immutable; once written, their contents can’t be changed, only replaced. Why would you want that? Think facebook, or tumblr or flickr – you’re not likely to ever update the content of an image… and the benefits that Swift brings are worth the loss of this capability. To clear some confusion, Swift is SOFTWARE. It is not a piece of hardware or an appliance, like a NAS box. It is not a Service (Like the S3 offering from Amazon, or CloudFiles from Rackspace). Swift is software, and free open-source software at that. The cost to deploy it is driven by the choices of hardware (physical or virtual) and operational choices made. But what considerations drive those decisions, and what are the tradeoffs? A coarse understanding of what magic Swift performs and how, is requi