Welcome to the documentation for using the SURF Object Store service which is based on Ceph RGW. The information on these pages will help you get started with Object Store. We welcome your comments at our Servicedesk Portal or your contribution to help us improve the documentation.

About Object Storage

There is a growing demand for general purpose Online Storage capabilities that may be used for the storage of large quantities of unstructured data in a shared multi-tenant environment. SURF’s object store cluster is an allround online cloud storage system which can meet this demand and that is characterised by its scalability, durability and availability. Object storage is ideal for storing unstructured data that can grow without bound. Object storage does not have a directory-type structure like a normal file system has but it organises its data in so-called containers that contain objects. There is no tree-like structure with files and directories. There are only containers with objects in them.

Ceph RGW provides access using the S3 protocol, which is the defacto standard for addressing object storage.

In the case of legacy accounts, authentication is provided via OpenStack Keystone. Users in a Keystone project are mapped to a tenant in RGW. At this time, creating projects and users is done by SURF's administrators.

Newer accounts uses Ceph's internal IAM accounts mechanism. This allows for self-service user management. These accounts live in a single, global tenant.