Object Store Quick Start

This section covers the required steps to get started with SD4H's object store.

Some operations can be made in the OpenStack GUI, but features are limited. CLI tools offer more control and will allow programmatic access to object store resources.

Prerequisites

• Install and configure your OpenStack CLI

Getting credentials for the object store

The object store maintains its own set of credentials.

What an Object Store is and isn't

(from https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse?tab=readme-ov-file#limitations)

Generally, an Object Store cannot offer the same performance or semantics as a local file system. More specifically:

• random writes or appends to files require rewriting the entire object, optimized with multi-part upload copy
• metadata operations such as listing directories have poor performance due to network latency
• non-AWS providers may have eventual consistency so reads can temporarily yield stale data (AWS offers read-after-write consistency since Dec 2020)
• no atomic renames of files or directories
• no coordination between multiple clients mounting the same bucket
• no hard links
• inotify detects only local modifications, not external ones by other clients or tools