Swift is a highly available, distributed, eventually consistent object/blob store. Organizations can use Swift to store lots of data efficiently, safely, and cheaply.

This documentation is generated by the Sphinx toolkit and lives in the source tree. Additional documentation on Swift and other components of OpenStack can be found on the OpenStack wiki and at http://docs.openstack.org.

OpenStack Swift is the massively scalable object storage of OpenStack. It can store billions of objects in a single cluster without any disturbances. But what happens if all of your objects are "small objects"?

Because OpenStack Swift stores objects as files on XFS, disks will end-up storing millions of small files, creating large performance and stability issues. This is all related to the constraints of POSIX filesystems.

During this presentation, we will give you an overview of these issues, and explain their root causes. You will then discover what we tried to overcome them, as well as the chosen solution. Eventually, we will present you results of our production deployment.

S3 is a product from Amazon, and as such, it includes “features” that are outside the scope of Swift itself. For example, Swift doesn’t have anything to do with billing, whereas S3 buckets can be tied to Amazon’s billing system. Similarly, log delivery is a service outside of Swift. It’s entirely possible for a Swift deployment to provide that functionality, but it is not part of Swift itself. Likewise, a Swift deployment can provide similar geographic availability as S3, but this is tied to the deployer’s willingness to build the infrastructure and support systems to do so.