Century Link Object Storage compared to Openstack Swift

Century Link Object Storage

Centurylink, now rebranded/acquired by Lumen is one of the world’s largest internet backbone providers.

Lumen has a storage solution. And it’s fast.

Their cloud platform is relatively new, but given their strong networking background, this sure is a competitor!

Lumen’s solution is “based on a popular software package”, which we guess is Openstack’s Swift.

You’ll have to work your way through literally awful documentation, which is messy and primed for dotNet developers, if you can even find API documentation. Chances are you’re going to be on the phone with their support engineers and/or your account manager in order to get something done.

But hey, having a backbone attached to your storage solution, AND having an awesome API along with it, just looks too good to pass up on.

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.