Object storage
The Ceph Object Gateway client is a leading storage backend for cloud platforms that provides a RESTful S3-compliant and Swift-compliant object storage for objects like audio, bitmap, video, and other data. Ceph Object Gateway, also known as RADOS Gateway (RGW), is an object storage interface built on top of the librados library to provide applications with a RESTful gateway to Ceph storage clusters.
Go through the following sections to get started with Ceph Object Gateways (object storage)
Object storage interfaces
The following are the object storage interfaces:
- Administrative API
- Provides an administrative interface for managing the Ceph Object Gateways. For more information, see Ceph Object Gateway administrative API.
- S3
- Provides object storage functionality with an interface that is compatible with a large subset of the Amazon S3 RESTful API. For more information, see Ceph Object Gateway and the S3 API.
- Swift
- Provides object storage functionality with an interface that is compatible with a large subset of the OpenStack Swift API. The Ceph Object Gateway is a service interacting with a Ceph storage cluster. For more information, see Ceph Object Gateway and the Swift API.
Common workloads
The following are the most common workloads for using Ceph Object Gateway:
- Data efficiency
- Use for erasure coding, thin provisioning, lifecycle management, and compression.
- Data security
- Use for object lock, key management, at rest and inflight encryption, and WORM.
- Data resilience
- Use for backup, snapshots, cloning, and business continuity.
Common use cases
The following are some of the most common uses cases for Ceph Object Gateway.
- Storage as a Service (SaaS)
- Provides scalability and performance for both small and large object stores.
- AI, Analytics and Big Data including Data Lake and Data Lake House
- Cloud native data lake, with massive scalability and high availability to support demanding workloads. For example, you can use IBM Storage Ceph to provide an external S3 object store for IBM watsonx.data.
- Backup and archive or large amounts of unstructured data
- A unique new way of architecting the dataflow in applications which is through event driven architectures.
- Data intensive workloads like Cloud Native (S3) object data
- Back up and recover into and from an object storage helps improve recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- Object gateways serve as intermediaries in IoT systems, aggregating data from various devices, translating communication protocols, and enabling edge processing. They enhance security, facilitate device management, and ensure interoperability, streamlining the overall IoT ecosystem.