What is Object Storage?

In the modern world of cloud computing, object storage is the storage and retrieval of unstructured blobs of data and metadata using an HTTP API. Instead of breaking files down into blocks to store it on disk using a file system, we deal with whole objects stored over the network. These objects could be an image file, logs, HTML files, or any self-contained blob of bytes. They are unstructured because there is no specific schema or format they need to follow.
Object storage took off because it greatly simplified the developer experience. Because the API consists of standard HTTP requests, libraries were quickly developed for most programming languages. Saving a blob of data became as easy as an HTTP PUT request to the object store. Retrieving the file and metadata is a normal GET request. Further, most object storage services can also serve the files publicly to your users, removing the need to maintain a web server to host static assets.

On top of that, object storage services charge only for the storage space you use (some also charge per HTTP request, and for transfer bandwidth). This is a boon for small developers, who can get world-class storage and hosting of assets at costs that scale with use.

What are the advantages of object storage?

• A simple HTTP API, with clients available for all major operating systems and programming languages
• A cost structure that means you only pay for what you use
• Built-in public serving of static assets means one less server for you to run yourself
• Some object stores offer built-in CDN integration, which caches your assets around the globe to make downloads and page loads faster for your users
• Optional versioning means you can retrieve old versions of objects to recover from accidental overwrites of data
• Object storage services can easily scale from modest needs to really intense use-cases without the developer having to launch more resources or rearchitect to handle the load
• Using an object storage service means you don’t have to maintain hard drives and RAID arrays, as that’s handled by the service provider
• Being able to store chunks of metadata alongside your data blob can further simplify your application architecture

What are the disadvantages of object storage?

• You can’t use object storage services to back a traditional database, due to the high latency of such services
• Object storage doesn’t allow you to alter just a piece of a data blob, you must read and write an entire object at once. This has some performance implications. For instance, on a file system, you can easily append a single line to the end of a log file. On an object storage system, you’d need to retrieve the object, add the new line, and write the entire object back. This makes object storage less ideal for data that changes very frequently
• Operating systems can’t easily mount an object store like a normal disk. There are some clients and adapters to help with this, but in general, using and browsing an object store is not as simple as flipping through directories in a file browser