If you have a website, application, or another web resource, you probably have static content.
In the pre-cloud era, you would put those files on a standard server and then serve them over the internet to all of your viewers, across the globe, from one specific geo location. Post-cloud era, with cloud services, you could achieve faster delivery and better scalability.
Now, you can share your static content reliably through high availability and scalable data storage at a low cost. IBM Cloud Object Storage (COS) combined with IBM Cloud Internet Services (CIS) caching features makes it easier to store, secure, and deliver your static content—image, video, music files, and even scripts like Cascading Style Sheets (css) or JavaScript (js)—in a few clicks.
What does this mean for IBM Cloud customers?
IBM Cloud users initially could only leverage COS with IBM Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN), and a manual process was needed to set each object to public access in a bucket to deliver content to users. With the integration of CIS and COS, we have streamlined and configured static content stored in COS and can deliver it to your public facing websites through the CIS caching feature.
Static content for web applications includes images, videos, JavaScript files, and user-generated content. The needs for content delivery vary by how often the content changes, the number of users that access the website at once, and how often users revisit the website. As the user-base of your application grows, offloading content delivery functions to another component frees up bandwidth and other computing resources. You can serve content at a location closer to your users, anywhere in the world.
CIS already provides customers with secure, reliable, and enhanced performance for their public-facing websites. With this integration, customers can now take advantage of CIS’s UI and API integration to access their static content stored in COS via the caching feature. CIS streamlines this process one step further by presenting the customer with a selection of COS instances and buckets (private and public) based on the customer’s level of access from the Page Rule section of the UI. Once a bucket is selected, CIS automatically caches the bucket’s contents into the cloud.
Similar to CIS, IBM Cloud CDN optimizes applications by pushing static content from the edge directly to the end user, regardless of the origin server, which improves the end-user experience. In order to minimize traffic to their servers, customers can store content in COS.
How is this a game changer?
The new integration of COS with CIS provides a unique and seamless experience across IBM’s storage and network offerings, allowing users to set a bucket to public access in COS and provide public-read access to all objects (file, image, etc.) in the bucket with a few clicks. We did this to make it easier to set anonymous access at the bucket level, rather than at the object level, and configure the bucket in CDN/CIS to make content available through the cloud.
IBM Cloud Object Storage helps you in the following ways:
- Enjoy infinite storage capacity because COS buckets automatically scale to suit your needs
- Reduce your costs and save time by not having to manage or scale your storage systems
- Improve performance as static content is offloaded to COS through reduced size and storage volumes required on your application server
Learn more about the Cloud Internet Services and Content Delivery Network (CDN) integration with IBM Cloud Object Storage and how you can easily deliver your content from Cloud Object Storage buckets.
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