Object Storage
Explore the fundamentals of object storage, including its structure, metadata use, and common use cases such as unstructured data, backup, and cloud-native apps. Understand various storage tiers and how object storage differs from other cloud storage types, helping you choose the right solution for your needs.
What is object storage?
Object storage is a type of storage where data is broken into smaller pieces called objects. Each object has an identifier. They are stored in a single repository called a container or a bucket. These objects can then be distributed across multiple nodes or servers.
Object storage is a relatively new model compared to traditional file storage or block storage. It's often called the storage of the cloud since it eliminates the scaling limits of traditional file systems. Unlike files in file storage, objects are stored in a flat structure. They don't follow any directory, folder, etc.
Besides a unique identifier, each object contains data, metadata, and attributes related to the metadata.
Identifiers and data are self-explanatory. Metadata is everything we need to know about the file itself, such as the time of creation, file size, the subject of a file, etc. We can think of metadata as an organizing mechanism. For unstructured data, such as videos and images, we rely on metadata to understand what that data is about. Associating the metadata with the object helps us find them quickly, even if we have billions of them. Metadata is customizable, and we can add metadata to an object based on ...