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Includes: 1. Inclusion of erasure coding info 2. Note about default constraints backport: mitaka Change-Id: Ieae09f432b7186391ddad7124e28e0ab3409c94c Closes-bug: #1596770
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Introduction to Object Storage
Object Storage (swift) is a robust, highly scalable and fault tolerant storage platform for unstructured data such as objects. Objects are stored bits, accessed through a RESTful, HTTP-based interface. You cannot access data at the block or file level. Object Storage is commonly used to archive and back up data, with use cases in virtual machine image, photo, video, and music storage.
Object Storage provides a high degree of availability, throughput, and performance with its scale out architecture. Each object is replicated across multiple servers, residing within the same data center or across data centers, which mitigates the risk of network and hardware failure. In the event of hardware failure, Object Storage will automatically copy objects to a new location to ensure that your chosen number of copies are always available.
Object Storage also employs erasure coding. Erasure coding is a set of algorithms that allows the reconstruction of missing data from a set of original data. In theory, erasure coding uses less storage capacity with similar durability characteristics as replicas. From an application perspective, erasure coding support is transparent. Object Storage implements erasure coding as a Storage Policy.
Object Storage is an eventually consistent distributed storage platform; it sacrifices consistency for maximum availability and partition tolerance. Object Storage enables you to create a reliable platform by using commodity hardware and inexpensive storage.
For more information, review the key concepts in the developer documentation at docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/.