Amazon Web Services is the public cloud vendor par excellence, so building solutions that are compliant with S3 approaches is a logical idea
News this morning from storage vendor Scality that the company is announcing the general availability of its S3 Server Software. The offering is an open source version of Scality’s S3 API and allows developers to code to Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage API on a local machine.
Packaged as a Docker container (what else!) the idea is that developers can local build applications that thereafter can be deployed on premises, on AWS or some combination of the above.
RING storage capabilities
Scality has grown to scale (pun intended) by offering storage solutions that now store some 800 billion objects. Scality’s RING storage supports any file and object application, sited on any hardware and with no capacity constraints. Given its standard API approaches, RING enables storage to be completed across public or private services and can be deployed on any standard x86 hardware, without the need to re-architect as infrastructure changes occur.
Using this single-server offering, enterprises can in theory speed up their development and, more important, speed up deployment of applications without having to worry about where and how the application is deployed. Developers can simply create their applications and then deploy.
Scality CEO Jérôme Lecat described the importance of this S3-centric approach:
“S3 has become the de-facto standard API for digital business applications to store unstructured data, but until now there was no easy solution to locally develop and test an application that can be deployed at web-scale. This version of our S3 API has been packaged as an S3 Server in a Docker container and is extremely easy to deploy, even on a laptop. The S3 Server is the same code as the version that can be deployed in production for billions of objects and petabytes of storage with the Scality RING Version 6.”
The S3 Server is written in Node.js and offers rich S3 API features and fast bucket listing. The S3 Server uses Docker volumes for storage and can be used for pilot and production deployment of several hundreds of terabytes. Both free and paid support options are available on Docker Hub and Github.
Of course, and as you’d expect, for companies that require a commercially supported version of the S3 Server, the Enterprise Edition is available as a subscription for $950 per month per server.
My POV
While cloud, or the public cloud, is in no way a zero sum game, the fact remains that AWS is the undisputed kingpin when it comes to the cloud. As such, standardizing on the AWS APIs is a logical move for many players. This is especially the case for vendors that seek to offer organizations a logical progression path from development to deployment and across the application lifecycle.
Of course, a cynic would suggest that this move is a case of Scality not seeing sufficient uptake at a high-scale level and needing to leverage a “bottom-up” adoption model. There is likely an enablement of that in this move, but that doesn’t reduce the logic of the move. This is a useful tool for developers, and it will undoubtedly help articulate the value proposition that Scality delivers to its customers.
