kalveygroup.com – Discussing Alibaba Cloud is kind of endless for use due to the large number of services provided by Alibaba Cloud. Previously, we have explained about some services such as DirectMail or ECS, and now we are going to brief some information about one of their service which is Object Storage Service (OSS)

What is OSS?

Object Storage Service or OSS is an service provided by Alibaba Cloud that provides encrypted, cost-effective, and easy-to-manage storage. With OSS, you can store and manage large number of files without having to invest on hardware. OSS is designed for 99.9999999999% (12 9’s) durability, and backed up with industry-leading SLA.

What Can OSS Do?

Here is a list of example that OSS can do:
1. Content Distribution / CDN

2. Data Migration Service (Backup/Restore)
3. Cloud Archive
4. Online/Cloud Drive
5. Data Lake Storage
6. Static Website Hosting

Why Alibaba Cloud OSS?

1. Easy to use
This allows users to perform data management very easily. In addition, Alibaba Cloud OSS also has an API that software developers can use to create custom systems

2. World Class Reliable Security System

Alibaba Cloud as an international cloud company has a world-class security system that can protect your data from threats.

3. High Reliability
Alibaba Cloud has multiple backups for data redundancy. Alibaba claims that their service is 99.9% available.

4. Cost-Effective

OSS offers four tiers of storage: Standard, Infrequent Access, Archive, Cold Archive. Each tier is designed to be cost-optimized for specific storage. For example, Archive tier offers one minute data retrieval service, while the cold archive tier offers the same retrieval service but within an hour.

5. Easy Data Migration

Do you want to migrate data for OSS? Alibaba Cloud provides features that do not require customers to change storage tools in order to migrate objects. OSS APIs can interact with objects that are compatible with Amazon S3, Azure Blob, Google Cloud, etc.

 6. Analytic Engines Support

Alibaba Cloud OSS can be integrated with lots of Alibaba Cloud Analytic Engines such as Flink, Data Lake Analytics, Elastic Map Reduce, Max Compute. It also supports machine learning product and able to communicate with open source project such as Databricks, Spark Hadoop, Presto, etc.

Payment Method

As with other Alibaba Cloud services, the supported payment methods for this service are Pay-As-You-Go and subscriptions

OSS Basic Terms

1. Storage Class
Alibaba Cloud OSS design 4 tiers of storage to help customers find the best storage service that fits their budget. Storage class consists of Standard, Infrequent Access, Archive, and Cold Archive. 
 

2. Bucket
Bucket is a term that describes the OSS objects container. Each of object in OSS is contained in a bucket. You can configure multiple variety of the bucket such as region, access control list, and the storage class. You can create multiple bucket for multiple storage class.

3. Object
Object which also know as files, is the basic unit for OSS data operation. Object consists of metadata, user data, and key. Key is used to identify an object in a bucket. Object metadata is a group of key and value pairs that describe the object’s properties.

4. Region
Region means the physical location of the OSS resources. You can select a region when creating a bucket. Each region will have differences on the cost and the request source.

5. Endpoint
Endpoint is a domain name that will be used to access OSS. OSS provides external service using HTTP RESTful APIs. Each region will access different endpoint.

6. AccessKey
Previously, we have covered on how to create AccessKey. You can find out what is AccessKey by visiting this article.