What Is Object Storage? A Plain-English Guide

Short summary

A plain-English explainer covering what object storage is, how it works (flat namespace, data + metadata + unique key), and how it compares to block and file storage. Includes S3 specs (11 nines durability, 5 TB max object size) and discusses erasure coding for durability. The post also promotes RustFS, a self-hosted S3-compatible object storage system, as a practical alternative to AWS S3.

• •Object storage manages data as discrete objects (data + metadata + key) in a flat namespace, scaling to billions of items
• •Differs from block (fast, no metadata) and file storage (hierarchical, poor at scale) by dropping the directory tree
• •RustFS offers S3-compatible API with erasure coding for self-hosted deployments

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