We are very pleased to announce that the IBM Redbooks team has just published the following IBM Redbooks publication: “Cloud Object Storage as a Service: IBM Cloud Object Storage from Theory to Practice!"

The book is a practical guide for IBM Cloud Object Storage Public Cloud Services, the newest addition to the IBM Cloud Object Storage (IBM COS, previously known as Cleversafe) family.  It  was  produced by a team of specialists from IBM around the world working at the IBM Almaden Center and also IBM Business Partner Mark III Systems Team working at their office in Austin, Texas.

With the announcement of the public offering, you now have 4 deployment choices for IBM COS:

• Private on-premises object storage
• Dedicated  object storage (single-tenant)
• Public object storage (multi-tenant)
• Hybrid object storage (a mix of on-premises, dedicated or public offerings)

The book explains these different deployment models with some details and then focuses on IBM Cloud Object Storage Public Cloud Services and hybrid solutions leveraging this offering. 

If you are not familiar with the object storage concepts, start with “Ch1 Introduction to object storage. You will learn about what qualifies business problems for object storage and comparison and positioning to other storage models.

“Ch2 Introducing IBM Cloud Object Store Public Services” compares different COS deployment models and goes into details of the public service capabilities and resiliency options. We don’t discuss the IBM COS internals in this book, since the IBM COS architecture, and actual implementation is transparent to the users of the IBM COS Public Services.  You can refer to the newly published IBM Redpaper ”IBM Cloud Object Storage Concepts and Architecture", REDP-5435 for a detailed discussion of the IBM COS architecture, technology and associated benefits.

Ready to start using the service?  Follow the instructions in “Ch3 Getting started with IBM Cloud Object Storage” on how to sign up for the service and other details of using it.

“Ch4 Typical applications for IBM Cloud Object Storage” describes several example IBM COS deployments across various industry verticals, provides use cases for IBM COS, and outlines IBM COS integration with other IBM offerings.  The aim of this chapter is to provide to system and application owners, architects, and administrators an outline of how IBM COS can fit into or enhance their business. 

The rest of the chapters in the book are hands on scenarios and real life solutions with IBM COS, Watson, Bluemix, IoT, Cloudant, Node.js, etc. The chapters are targeted for cloud solution developers and integration architects. We describe step by step implementation and also provide the source code for most of these scenarios.

I hope you enjoy the book! If you have comments, please use the Comments section of this blog post below. 

Vasfi Gucer is an IBM Redbooks Project Leader. He works with technical experts to create books, guides, blogs, and videos. Follow Vasfi on Twitter at @VasfiGucer.