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Cloud object


Cloud object storage is a decentralized approach to storing digital information in a cloud service provider's data centers. Object storage systems can access any piece of data without needing to know on which physical storage device, file system or directory it resides.

Instead of a file path, the object storage software design includes a globally unique identifier for each object along with rich, customizable metadata. The metadata is separated to enable other capabilities such as application- and user-specific data for indexing, interfaces that can be directly programmed by the application, a global namespace and more flexible data management policies. This means that objects can be stored across multiple data centers located in different parts of the world and accessed directly through application program interfaces (APIs), HTTP and HTTPS.

Object storage's main advantage is that it makes data more resilient to disaster or hardware failures because it is highly distributed -- so it is still available even if several nodes fail. It's also a lot cheaper compared to traditional storage because object storage is stored on commodity hardware or virtual machines (VMs) that are infinitely scalable. Objects are stored in a flat address space, which eliminates complexity and scalability challenges. Data protection is built into the architecture, which can be in the form of either replication technology or erasure coding. 

Cloud object storage vendors include Amazon Simple Storage Service, Caringo Swarm, Cloudian HyperStore, Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Scalable Object Storage based on the Scality Ring software-defined storage platform, Hitachi Vantara's Hitachi Content Platform, IBM Cloud Object Storage and the OpenStack Swift open source object storage system.

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