Swift - object storage

Swift is one of the storage services available to OpenStack users. It provides an object-based storage service and is accessible through REST APIs. Compared to traditional storage solutions, file shares, or block-based access, an Object-Storage takes the approach of dealing with stored data as objects that can be stored and retrieved from the Object-Store. A very high-level overview of Object Storage goes like this. To store the data, the Object-Store splits it into smaller chunks and stores it in separate containers. These containers are maintained in redundant copies spread across a cluster of storage nodes to provide high availability, auto-recovery, and horizontal scalability.

We will leave the details of the Swift architecture for later. Briefly, it has a number of benefits:

• It has no central brain, and indicates no Single Point Of Failure (SPOF)
• It is curative, and indicates auto-recovery in the case of failure
• It is highly scalable for large petabytes of storage access by scaling horizontally
• It has a better performance, which is achieved by spreading the load over the storage nodes
• It has inexpensive hardware that can be used for redundant storage clusters