From File Systems to the Cloud and Back

Cloud storages today are an excellent alternative to storing information on regional computer system or in NAS storage. Started with Amazon S3, such services are offered by a lots of business, including Microsoft with their Azure Blob Storage.

The benefits of cloud storage are almost unlimited storage capacity (use as much as you need, not as you have), the range between the storage and your location (the information will not be lost in a mishap or fire, and gain access to of third parties to your information is seriously restricted), reduced expense of data management.

At the very same time cloud storage works in the way that does not match routine techniques to storage access, such as hierarchical file systems and relational databases. Internally designed as big tables with an index and BLOB field for information, they don't give adequate versatility that file systems or database management systems can use to the developer and user. The developer needs to carry out translation between the information he has in the application and the back-end cloud storage.

One more significant drawback is a distinction between APIs, used by various services. While most of services offer so-called REST API, this API remains in fact a format for requests and responses sent over HTTP. Demand commands, specifications and functions offered by services, vary significantly. Due to this switching in between cloud services needs writing of separate code for each API.

Finally, the primary element of (in) approval of storage based options is a concern of ensuring data security. Though service providers tell us about encryption utilized on their side, such file encryption is carried out on their systems and there's no assurance that it's actually reputable and if it is even carried out. So safety of the information is a real issue and not a dream of cloud storage challengers.

Thankfully, there exists a possibility to resolve all of the above problems in a basic and really cost-efficient way.

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

As most file systems, SolFS is page-based. This suggests 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 support possible SolFS supports callback mode, in which it asks your application to shop or recover the block to or from the back-end storage. So all you need to do is execute 2 simple functions "put the page #X to the cloud storage" and "obtain the page #X from the storage" in your code, which's all - you have a file system in the cloud!

However that's not all SolFS can use. The file system offers numerous sophisticated features, such as integrated encryption and compression (carried out on your side, if you keep in mind the cloud security problem referenced above), almost endless possibilities for saving metadata (different additional info about the primary file or information), and to carry out SQL-like look for files. Furthermore, if you require customized encryption (eg. utilizing keys saved 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, but a relational database? No problems either! You can use your favorite DBMS and have it save 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 by means of database management system of your option.

Another benefit of SolFS is that moving from one cloud storage service to another is as basic as rewriting 2 basic functions for saving and recovering of pages to and from the cloud storage.

You can state that you still require the code, that deals with the cloud. This is correct, however it's much easier to compose the code that shops and obtains fixed-sized files (each page has the same size) by page number, than to try to execute a relational database or a file system in the cloud yourself.

If you don't want to compose cloud-specific code at all, we have a service for you too. It's CloudBlackbox - the components that provide consistent access to various cloud storage services. These parts both supply uniform access to cloud storages (Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure at the moment with more to come) and provide boosted encryption abilities, such as certificate-based encryption of information. So if you are transferring to the cloud, you do not need to dispose of established paradigms and existing code. Upgrading them to contemporary market offerings is simple and quick.

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