From File Systems to the Cloud and Back

Cloud storages today are an excellent alternative to keeping data on local computer system or in NAS storage. Started with Amazon S3, such services are provided by a lots of companies, including Microsoft with their Azure Blob Storage.

The advantages of cloud storage are nearly infinite storage capability (use as much as you require, not as you have), the distance between the storage and your place (the information won't be lost in an accident or fire, and gain access to of 3rd parties to your information is seriously limited), decreased expense of information management.

At the very same time cloud storage operates in the manner in which does not match regular techniques to storage access, such as hierarchical file systems and relational databases. Internally developed as big tables with an index and BLOB field for data, they do not offer sufficient flexibility that file systems or database management systems can offer to the developer and user. The developer needs to perform translation in between the data he has in the application and the back-end cloud storage.

Another substantial downside is a distinction between APIs, provided by different services. While the majority of services provide so-called REST API, this API remains in fact a format for demands and responses sent over HTTP. Demand commands, parameters and functions provided by services, differ considerably. Due to this switching in between cloud services requires writing of different code for each API.

Finally, the primary element of (in) approval of storage based options is a concern of guaranteeing information security. Though service providers tell us about file encryption used on their side, such file encryption is performed on their systems and there's no assurance that it's really trusted and if it is even performed. So safety of the data is a genuine problem and not a fantasy of cloud storage opponents.

Luckily, there exists a possibility to attend to all of the above issues in a simple and very cost-efficient method.

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

As a lot of file systems, SolFS is page-based. This indicates that it runs 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 almost any storage.

To make such backing possible SolFS supports callback mode, in which it asks your application to store or retrieve the block to or from the back-end storage. So all you require to do is execute two easy functions "put the page #X to the cloud storage" and "recover 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 offer. The file system offers a number of advanced functions, such as integrated encryption and compression (performed in your corner, if you remember the cloud security problem referenced above), nearly limitless possibilities for saving metadata (numerous supplementary details about the primary file or data), and to perform SQL-like look for files. Additionally, if you require customized encryption (eg. utilizing keys kept on cryptographic hardware tokens), this is possible with 2 other callbacks - "encrypt page #X" and "decrypt page #X".

And what if you need not a file system, however a relational database? No problems either! You can use your preferred DBMS and have it keep 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 by means of database management system of your choice.

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

You can state that you still need the code, that deals with the cloud. This is correct, but it's a lot easier to write the code that shops and recovers fixed-sized files (each page has the same size) by page number, than to attempt to carry out a relational database or a file system in the cloud yourself.

If you do not want to write cloud-specific code at all, we have an option for you too. It's CloudBlackbox - the components that provide uniform access to numerous cloud storage services. These parts both offer uniform access to cloud storages (Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure at the minute with more to come) and supply enhanced file encryption capabilities, such as certificate-based file encryption of information. So if you are transferring to the cloud, you don't require to dispose of established paradigms and existing code. Upgrading them to modern industry offerings is simple and fast.

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