new more helpful README

Change-Id: Ie5e88178e061955aea8759e5451a2d33ccc76511

README

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-Swift
------
-
-A distributed object store that was originally developed as the basis for 
-Rackspace's Cloud Files.
-
-To build documentation run `python setup.py build_sphinx`, and then browse to
-/doc/build/html/index.html.
-
-The best place to get started is the "SAIO - Swift All In One", which will walk
-you through setting up a development cluster of Swift in a VM.
-
-For more information, visit us at http://launchpad.net/swift, or come hang out
-on our IRC channel, #openstack on freenode.
-
---
-Swift Development Team

README.md

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+# Swift
+
+A distributed object storage system designed to scale from a single machine
+to thousands of servers. Swift is optimized for multi-tenancy and high
+concurrency. Swift is ideal for backups, web and mobile content, and any other
+unstructured data that can grow without bound.
+
+Swift provides a simple, REST-based API fully documented at
+http://doc.openstack.org/.
+
+Swift was originally developed as the basis for Rackspace's Cloud Files and
+was open-sourced in 2010 as part of the OpenStack project. It has since grown
+to include contributions from many companies and has spawned a thriving
+ecosystem of 3rd party tools. Swift's contributors are listed in the AUTHORS
+file.
+
+## Docs
+
+To build documentation install sphinx (`pip install sphinx`), run
+`python setup.py build_sphinx`, and then browse to /doc/build/html/index.html.
+These docs are auto-generated after every commit and available online at
+http://docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/.
+
+## For Developers
+
+The best place to get started is the ["SAIO - Swift All In One"](http://docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/development_saio.html).
+This document will walk you through setting up a development cluster of Swift
+in a VM. The SAIO environment is ideal for running small-scale tests against
+swift and trying out new features and bug fixes.
+
+You can run unit tests with `.unittests` and functional tests with
+`.functests`.
+
+### Code Organization
+
+ * bin/: Executable scripts that are the processes run by the deployer
+ * doc/: Documentation
+ * etc/: Sample config files
+ * swift/: Core code
+    * account/: account server
+    * common/: code shared by different modules
+        * middleware/: "standard", officially-supported middleware
+        * ring/: code implementing Swift's ring
+    * container/: container server
+    * obj/: object server
+    * proxy/: proxy server
+ * test/: Unit and functional tests
+
+### Data Flow
+
+Swift is a WSGI application and uses eventlet's WSGI server. After the
+processes are running, the entry point for new requests is the `Application`
+class in `swift/proxy/server.py`. From there, a controller is chosen, and the
+request is processed. The proxy may choose to forward the request to a back-
+end server. For example, the entry point for requests to the object server is
+the `ObjectController` class in `swift/obj/server.py`.
+
+
+## For Deployers
+
+Deployer docs are also available at
+http://docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/. A good starting point is at
+http://docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/deployment_guide.html
+
+You can run functional tests against a swift cluster with `.functests`. These
+functional tests require `/etc/swift/test.conf` to run. A sample config file
+can be found in this source tree in `test/sample.conf`.
+
+## For Client Apps
+
+For client applications, official Python language bindings are provided at
+http://github.com/openstack/python-swiftclient.
+
+Complete API documentation at
+http://docs.openstack.org/api/openstack-object-storage/1.0/content/
+
+----
+
+For more information come hang out in #openstack-swift on freenode.
+
+Thanks,
+
+The Swift Development Team