From File Systems to the Cloud and Back

Cloud storages today are a fantastic alternative to storing information on local computer or in NAS storage. Started with Amazon S3, such services are offered by a dozen of companies, consisting of Microsoft with their Azure Blob Storage.

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

At the very same time cloud storage works in the way that doesn't match regular approaches to storage access, such as hierarchical file systems and relational databases. Internally designed as substantial tables with an index and BLOB field for information, they do not give sufficient flexibility that submit systems or database management systems can use to the developer and user. The designer needs to perform translation in between the information he has in the application and the back-end cloud storage.

One more considerable drawback is a difference in between APIs, used by different services. While most of services provide so-called REST API, this API is in truth a format for requests and reactions sent out over HTTP. Request commands, criteria and functions offered by services, vary considerably. Due to this switching in between cloud services requires writing of different code for each API.

Lastly, the main element of (in) approval of storage based services is a question of ensuring data safety. Though provider tell us about file encryption utilized on their side, such file encryption is performed on their systems and there's no guarantee that it's actually reputable and if it is even performed. So security of the data is a genuine problem and not a dream of cloud storage opponents.

Fortunately, there exists a possibility to deal with all of the above issues in a basic and very cost-efficient way.

Solid 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 implies that it operates not with random series of bytes, but with blocks (sectors on the disk, pages in memory) of fixed size. This makes it simple to back SolFS with almost any storage.

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

However that's not all SolFS can provide. The file system offers a number of sophisticated features, such as integrated encryption and compression (carried out on your side, if you keep in mind the cloud security issue referenced above), almost unlimited possibilities for saving metadata (different extra details about the primary file or information), and to carry out SQL-like look for files. Moreover, if you require custom encryption (eg. using keys stored on cryptographic hardware tokens), this is possible with two other callbacks - "encrypt page #X" and "decrypt page #X".

And what if you need not a file system, however a relational database? No issues either! You can use your favorite DBMS and have it store it's files on the virtual disk, developed by SolFS (System Edition). By doing this the database files are stored 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 easy as rewording two fundamental functions for saving and obtaining of pages to and from the cloud storage.

You can state that you still need the code, that deals with the cloud. This is proper, however it's a lot easier to compose the code that stores and retrieves fixed-sized files (each page has the same size) by page number, than to attempt to implement a relational database or a file system in the cloud yourself.

If you do not want to compose cloud-specific code at all, we have an option for you too. It's CloudBlackbox - the elements that supply consistent access to various cloud storage services. These components both supply uniform access to cloud storages (Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure at the minute with more to come) and offer boosted encryption abilities, such as certificate-based encryption of information. So if you are moving to the cloud, you do not require to dispose of established paradigms and existing code. Upgrading them to contemporary industry offerings is easy and quick.

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