From File Systems to the Cloud and Back

Cloud storages today are an excellent alternative to storing data on regional computer system or in NAS storage. Started with Amazon S3, such solutions are used by a lots of business, including Microsoft with their Azure Blob Storage.

The benefits of cloud storage are nearly infinite storage capacity (usage as much as you need, not as you have), the distance between the storage and your area (the data won't be lost in a mishap or fire, and access of third parties to your data is badly limited), decreased cost of data management.

At the same time cloud storage works in the way that does not match regular approaches to storage gain access to, such as hierarchical file systems and relational databases. Internally created as huge tables with an index and BLOB field for information, they don't offer adequate flexibility that submit systems or database management systems can use to the developer and user. The developer requires to perform translation between the data he has in the application and the back-end cloud storage.

One more significant drawback is a difference between APIs, used by different services. While most of services provide so-called REST API, this API remains in fact a format for demands and responses sent out over HTTP. Demand commands, specifications and functions offered by services, vary considerably. Due to this switching in between cloud services needs writing of different code for each API.

Lastly, the main factor of (in) approval of storage based solutions is a concern of guaranteeing data safety. Though provider tell us about encryption utilized on their side, such file encryption is carried out on their systems and there's no assurance that it's actually reputable and if it is even performed. So safety of the data is a genuine issue and not a dream of cloud storage challengers.

Fortunately, there exists a possibility to address all of the above problems in a basic and really cost-efficient method.

Solid File System (SolFS) provides the missing pieces that fit well into cloud storage architecture.

As most file systems, SolFS is page-based. This suggests that it operates not with random series of bytes, however with blocks (sectors on the disk, pages in memory) of repaired size. This makes it easy to back SolFS with practically any storage.

To make such support possible SolFS supports callback mode, in which it asks your application to shop or obtain the block to or from the back-end storage. So all you require to do is carry out two simple functions "put the page #X to the cloud storage" and "obtain the page #X from the storage" in your code, which's all - you have a file system in the cloud!

But that's not all SolFS can provide. The file system offers a number of advanced functions, such as built-in encryption and compression (performed in your corner, if you keep in mind the cloud security problem referenced above), almost unlimited possibilities for keeping metadata (numerous extra info about the main file or information), and to carry out SQL-like search for files. Moreover, if you require customized encryption (eg. using secrets stored on cryptographic hardware tokens), this is possible with 2 other callbacks - "secure page #X" and "decrypt page #X".

And what if you need not a file system, but a relational database? No problems either! You can utilize your preferred DBMS and have it save it's files on the virtual disk, produced by SolFS (System Edition). This way the database files are saved in the cloud storage, and your application works with them through database management system of your option.

Another benefit of SolFS is that moving from one cloud storage service to another is as basic as rewriting 2 fundamental functions for keeping and obtaining of pages to and from the cloud storage.

You can say that you still require the code, that works with the cloud. This is right, but it's much easier to compose the code that shops and retrieves fixed-sized files (each page has the very same size) by page number, than to attempt to implement a relational database or a file system in the cloud yourself.

If you don't want to compose cloud-specific code at all, we have an option for you too. It's CloudBlackbox - the components that supply consistent access to numerous cloud storage services. These components both offer consistent access to cloud storages (Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure at the moment with more to come) and offer improved file encryption abilities, such as certificate-based file encryption of information. So if you are moving to the cloud, you don't require to discard established paradigms and existing code. Upgrading them to contemporary industry offerings is simple and fast.

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