Cloud Object Store
Learned in SE464.
A flexible general-purpose file store for cloud apps. The canonical example is Amazon S3.
- Managed by cloud provider
- Capacity available is “unlimited”
- Provides a network API (often REST) for accessing files
- Apps access files like a remote database
- Often provides a public HTTP GET interface to access files
- Easily connected to a CDN, or URLs can be used directly
Alternatives
- Networked file system (NFS on Unix, SMB on Windows): managed by the OS, mounts a remote drive like a local filesystem. Less useful for modern cloud apps.
- HDFS: when you need to use Hadoop/Spark for distributed processing. Data resides on the same machines where computation happens, which is the whole point.
Modern apps should interact with cloud-based storage services rather than networked filesystems.