Object Storage

Imagine you're building a photo-sharing application like Instagram. Users upload millions of photos every day, each ranging from a few hundred kilobytes to several megabytes.

You need to store these photos somewhere they can be retrieved quickly, remain available even if servers fail, and not cost a fortune as your user base grows from thousands to millions.

Your first instinct might be to store the photos on a traditional file server or in a database.

But here's the problem: a single file server runs out of disk space. A database becomes painfully slow when storing binary files at scale. And managing a distributed file system across multiple servers is extremely complex.

This is exactly the problem that object storage solves.

In this chapter, we will cover what an object storage is, how it works, it's key features and when to use it.