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Amazon S3 compared to Openstack Swift

Amazon S3
Versus
Openstack Swift

Features

Storage Features of Amazon S3 compared to Openstack Swift
Amazon S3FeaturesOpenstack Swift
Cloud based
GDPR Compliant
On premise
Open source
Versioned files
Cross Region Replication
API
S3 Compatible API
Portal, CLI, REST apiManagement interfacesREST api
Event hooks/pubsub
Best effort. Credits below 99.9%. That is 43 minutes of downtime allowed per month without having to issue creditsSLA
5 TBMaximum object filesize5 GB
A 0 byte file has 8 KB of chargeable overhead for metadata.Minimum object filesize
unlimitedRecommended max file count per bucketunlimited, with note that it’s not recommended to store more than ~1M, depending on hardware setup for the SQLite index
unlimitedMax filesize for a bucketunlimited
500 - upgradable if you need it.Maximum amount of bucketsunlimited
Logs
Amazon has designed their very own PreSigned URL mechanism which is now used globally across providersAuthentication / ACL
S3 integrates seamlessly into Amazon’s CloudFront CDN, as well as other CDNsCDN integration
Peering & interconnect
Unsupported Paid Feature Supported Unknown

Descriptions

Amazon S3

World’s biggest Cloud Storage Provider. Amazon, traditionally an online book store, has put a target on the cloud compute space when it shifted its focus to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006. E-Commerce competition was tough, but public cloud companies back then were scarce, and usability and user friendly products were a long way from being invented.

Amazon’s reign on cloud computing has left its mark in public cloud-land. Competitors have trouble keeping up, if they even get to a point of feature-parity at all. With Amazon’s S3 storage being one of the first, it has basically dictated a standard for the public cloud’s blob storage protocol.

Needless to say, Amazon invented the S3 (Simple Storage Service) standard.

Openstack Swift

Openstack’s founders, Rackspace and NASA, have created this platform with (public) cloud in mind.

Openstack is completely opensource and freely availalble under the Apache License. Meaning, you’re free to spin up your own cloud using their software. Openstack’s storage solution (Swift) is pluggable to be s3 compatible.

Openstack has many providers offering up their hardware on the openstack IaaS layer. To name a few: Canonical’s Ubuntu Bootstack and TATA’s managed infra services

Openstack’s pluggability is where its true power lies. Its sourcecode is written in Python and actively maintained. They have many performance and security enhancements, as well as plugins ready to be installed.

Comparisons