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Captain Storage

GjirafaTech Captain Storage is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier.

Storage has a simple web services interface that you can use to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, and inexpensive data storage infrastructure that GjirafaTech Captain uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

This introduction to GjirafaTech Captain Storage provides a detailed summary of this web service. After reading this section, you should have a good idea of what it offers and how it can fit in with your business.

This guide describes how you send requests to create buckets, store and retrieve your objects, and manage permissions on your resources. The guide also describes access control and the authentication process. Access control defines who can access objects and buckets within Storage, and the type of access (for example, READ and WRITE). The authentication process verifies the identity of a user who is trying to access GjirafaTech Captain.

Advantages of using GjirafaTech Captain Storage#

GjirafaTech Captain Storage is intentionally built with a minimal feature set that focuses on simplicity and robustness. Following are some of the advantages of using GjirafaTech Captain Storage:

  • Creating buckets - create and name a bucket that stores data. Buckets are the fundamental containers in GjirafaTech Captain Storage for data storage.

  • Storing data - store an infinite amount of data in a bucket. Upload as many objects as you like into an Storage bucket. Each object is stored and retrieved using a unique developer-assigned key.

  • Downloading data - download your data or enable others to do so. Download your data anytime you like, or allow others to do the same.

  • Permissions - grant or deny access to others who want to upload or download data into your Storage bucket. Grant upload and download permissions to three types of users.

  • Standard API - use standards-based REST API designed to work with any internet-development toolkit.

GjirafaTech Captain Storage concepts#

This section describes key concepts and terminology you need to understand to use GjirafaTech Captain Storage effectively. They are presented in the order that you will most likely encounter them.

Topics#

  • Buckets
  • Objects
  • Keys

Buckets#

A bucket is a container for objects stored in Storage. Every object is contained in a bucket. For example, if the object named "winter.jpg" is stored in the "captain" bucket, then it is addressable using the URL https://captain.blob.gjirafa.tech/winter.jpg.

Buckets serve several purposes:

  • They organize the Storage namespace at the highest level.

  • They identify the account responsible for storage and data transfer charges.

  • They play a role in access control.

  • They serve as the unit of aggregation for usage reporting.

Objects#

Objects are the fundamental entities stored in GjirafaTech Captain Storage. Objects consist of object data and metadata. The data portion is opaque to GjirafaTech Captain Storage. The metadata is a set of name-value pairs that describe the object. These include some default metadata, such as the date last modified, and standard HTTP metadata, such as Content-Type. You can also specify custom metadata at the time the object is stored.

An object is uniquely identified within a bucket by a key (name).

Keys#

A key is the unique identifier for an object within a bucket. Every object in a bucket has exactly one key. The combination of a bucket-key uniquely identify each object. So you can think of GjirafaTech Captain Storage as a basic data map between "bucket + key" and the object itself. Every object in GjirafaTech Captain Storage can be uniquely addressed through the combination of the web service endpoint, bucket name and key. For example, in the URL https://captain.blob.gjirafa.tech/winter.jpg, "captain" is the name of the bucket and "winter.jpg" is the key.