Choosing the right infrastructure solution is more critical than ever, with on-premises, private, and public cloud options available. With data doubling yearly and budgets remaining flat, making more informed decisions about your cloud strategy is critical to saving money and extracting more value from your data to stay competitive.
Limitless scale is one of the main reasons why object storage is the storage of the cloud. All of the major public cloud services, use object storage as their primary storage. Compared to more traditional storage systems such as file or block storage, object storage is relatively new. So, what exactly is object storage? In a nutshell, it is unstructured data storage that overcomes the scaling limitations of traditional file storage.
In this blog post, we are going to cover the benefits of the Alibaba Object Storage Service.
What is Alibaba OSS?
The Alibaba Object Storage Service (OSS) is a cloud-based service that allows you to store, back up, and archive any amount of non-structured data such as images, videos, and documents.
In contrast to a structured file service, where you navigate to a file through its directory structure, files in OSS are uploaded into a container, and each file has its unique address to access it.
OSS is a low-cost, highly secure, easily scalable, and trustworthy cloud storage solution. OSS allows you to store and retrieve any type of data at any time and from any location. To transfer large amounts of data into or out of Alibaba Cloud’s OSS, you can use API operations and SDKs provided by Alibaba cloud or OSS migration tools.
Benefits of Alibaba OSS
There are benefits to using traditional storage services. The first is reliability. To protect against service outages, OSS provides up to 99.995% service availability and up to 12 nines data durability.
It provides automatic scaling without interfering with external services. It also offers redundant data backup on an automated basis. It can also support automatic failover with the optional cross-region replication. So there’s redundancy.
In OSS, there are two types of redundancy. LRS stands for local redundant storage, and ZRS stands for zone redundant storage.
LRS stores each object’s data on multiple devices in the same region, ensuring data durability and availability in the event of hardware failure.
Within the same region, ZRS distributes user data across three zones. Even if one zone goes down, your data will still be accessible.
The integrity of data is checked regularly to detect data damage caused by factors such as hardware failure. OSS uses redundant data to reconstruct and repair damaged data.
OSS provides enterprise-grade multilevel security as well as denial-of-service attack protection. In addition, it allows for multi-user resource isolation as well as remote disaster recovery. It also supports authentication, authorisation, IP addresses, blocklists and allowlists, and Resource Access Management (RAM accounts). Furthermore, it provides extensive logging to assist in the detection of malicious access.
Costs. The fees charged by OSS are based on actual usage. Fees incurred within an hour are billed the following hour. Costs are calculated using the formula fees = actual usage x unit price. The term “actual usage” refers to the amount of storage used, the amount of data transferred, and the number of API requests made. There are no upfront costs, and data uploading into OSS is free. It’s simple to use. OSS includes:
- A standard restful API interface.
- A variety of SDK client tools.
- A web-based console.
Uploading, downloading, retrieving, and managing large amounts of data for websites and applications is as simple as it is for regular files in Windows. There is no limit to the number of files that can be uploaded. File sizes can range from one bite to 48.8 terabytes for a single file.
The maximum size, on the other hand, is determined by the method used to upload. Moreover, unlike traditional hardware storage, OSS allows you to easily scale up or expand your storage space as required.
It allows for streaming upload and download, which is ideal for business scenarios. It includes lifecycle management. You can delete expired data in batches or move it to a lower-cost archive service. Image processing, which supports format conversion, thumbnails, cropping, watermarks, scaling, and other operations, is one of the other benefits. In addition, Audio-video transcoding allows for high-quality, high-speed, parallel audio/video transcoding of audio/video files stored in OSS. Furthermore, Alibaba’s content delivery network can be used to accelerate the delivery of OSS content.
Wrap-up
Object storage has progressed from a niche solution to storing massive amounts of the world’s data. Its popularity is growing, and while the filesystem is here to stay, it is no longer the only option.
“Object Storage” is a straightforward building block in and of itself. Still, complex, feature-rich solutions to preserve and distribute data have often been built around it because it is such a powerful concept.
Finally, object storage solutions are likely to provide every major organisation that stores a significant amount of unstructured data with a better, safer, more future-proof, and more integrated with other applications way to keep their data in a truly accessible and reusable manner.
There are great Cloud competitors in the market that offer this type of service. Alibaba OSS provides the same and much more. The number of available resources (Documentation Centre, Education) help customers understand its value proposition and use this solution efficiently.
Additional resources
Object Storage Service Product Information
Object Storage Service Documentation Page
Certification course: Operate and Manage Object Storage on the Cloud
API & SDKs for Developers
About Alibaba Cloud
Alibaba pricing