Object storage for Cloud Foundry apps
One of the key mandates of Cloud Native Apps is to be stateless. This allows them to be ephemeral and to scale out massively. In order to do so they must store their data outside somewhere, but where? The truth is that Cloud Native Apps love “Object storage”. Object storage is in way similar to File storage, but unlike File it doesn't have a directory tree. Data is organized in "buckets" which are a single level deep. These "buckets" must have a unique name. "Objects" are files that get stored along with a unique name within the bucket. Apps use this unique identifier retrieve the object. You could say that it is a key-value store where the value portion is a file. Two factors allow object storage to grow orders of magnitude larger than file storage: The simple (almost absence of) data structure Metadata is stored along with the object These mean you don't need to preallocate a table of pointers to files and directories as well t...