Object Storage Service (OBS)
Companies and cloud service providers are facing the challenge to keep pace with exponential data growth. This includes not only the physical scaling of the storage itself, but also the administration of large amounts of data. From a consumer perspective, data needs to be available everywhere and all the time. This requires proper security mechanics that ensure that only target consumer services have access to the data.
For these storage demands the Object Storage Service (OBS) is the perfect fit. A highly secure, reliable and scalable storage solution that allows you to store any volume of unstructured data in any format. It is accessible from any location at any time via various accessibility options like REST APIs. OBS provides different storage classes allowing you to cost-effectively manage your data depending on your accessibility demands. The warm storage class is suitable for infrequently accessed data. It offers lower storage costs at a slightly higher latency compared to the standard class while cold storage class is the best fit for rarely accessed data, such as archives where access does not need to be real-time.
OBS data is stored in the Deutsche Telekom's datacenters. These run in Europe and comply with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) requirements. This ensures that Open Telekom Cloud services built on top of this infrastructure also easily and heedlessly comply to the GDPR.
OBS achieves an availability of 99.95% and a durability of up to 99.9999999999% (12 nines). This ensures that your data is available, accessible and protected against data loss and data corruption at all times.
In a lot of cases, stored data is infrequently or even rarely accessed. With OBS, you are provided with 3 storage classes, allowing you to optimize your costs based on data accessibility demands, making it the perfect fit for cloud native applications.
OBS is physically as well as logically secured. Policies or Access Control Lists make it possible to granulary define who is able to access data, which is strictly enforced by the implemented least-privilege principle. In addition, all your data stored in your bucket can be protected via default bucket encryption or individually be encrypted on object level.
Lifecycle rules allow for the specification of rules for your bucket so that objects are automatically transferred to storage classes or even deleted after a specified period. This allows you to automatically move objects to the warm or cold storage class, trading in latency for a more cost-efficient storage. In the case of enabled versioning, it is possible to create seperate rules for historical as well as the current version of your data.
OBS provides multiple methods to manage access and permissions for your objects and buckets. These can be either configured by the IAM Policy, the Bucket Access Control Lists (ACLs) or the specific Bucket & Object Policies. Bucket & Object Policies allow granular definition of who is allowed to access or perform which kinds of action on which resources. ACLs allows you to specify read & write access rights to specific users or user groups on the bucket.
Versioning allows you to store multiple historic versions of an object, protecting you from accidental data deletion, overwriting or generic application faults by enabling you to restore your object to a former version of itself. Versioning will increase your storage consumption, as objects are stored multiple times in your OBS using a dedicated object version ID.
OBS supports object encryption via the Open Telekom Cloud Key Management Service (KMS), which uses the industry standard XTS-AES-256 encryption algorithm. When default encryption is enabled, all newly uploaded objects will be encrypted by default and stored in your bucket. In case you need a more granular management, it is even possible to individually encrypt objects throughout the upload process.
By enabling the logging functionality, OBS will create and store generated logs inside your bucket. Afterwards, you can conveniently analyze actions executed on your bucket in detail. The event notifications functionality can be used to inform you once a specific event such as the creation or deletion of an object has occured. This way you can keep track of what is happening and analyse activities inside your bucket.
OBS allows you to host entire static websites, or also allows for the usage of resources stored in OBS via cross-origin requests. In order to avoid that a 3rd party website makes use of your content, you can whitelist URLs accessing the content as well as blacklist those that should not be able to access your OBS storage. This way you can ensure only authorized websites or web applications can access your data.
The OBS Service supports the creation of a parallel file system (PFS) based on POSIX. Using the OBS as parallel file system enables you to e.g. connect your virtual machine (ECS) to the file system using a POSIX supporting client. The parallel file system functionality is well suited for High Performance Computing as well as media asset archiving scenarios.
The object storage service cross-region replication functionality allows you to replicate the objects stored in a bucket to a different region. This will make your data available in a total of 6 availability zones spread across 4 physical datacenter. Therefore, usage will increase the security and resilience level of your data and fulfill demands of geo-redundancy according to BSI, KRITIS or other regulatory requirements.
Standard | Warm | Cold | |
Performance | Top-notch performance, reliability, and availability | Reliable, inexpensive & real-time storage | Long retention of archived data at the lowest price |
Use case | Cloud application, data & content sharing, hot data storage | Web Disk applications, enterprise backup, active archiving, data monitoring | Archive, medical image storage, video material storage, replacement of tape libraries |
Duration | No limit | Min. 30 days | Min. 90 days |
Access latency | Lowest latency | Low latency | 1 - 5 mins (Expedited) |
Recommended access | Daily & frequent access with lowest latency | Once a month access with low latency | 1. Every half a year with expedited access |
Durability | Up to 99.9999999999% (12x9) | Up to 99.9999999999% (12x9) | Up to 99.999999999% (11x9) |
Availability | 99.95% | 99.95% | 99.95% |
Redundancy | 3 availability zones | 3 availability zones | 3 availability zones |
OBS is the perfect storage solution for your big data analytics. It is nearly limitlessly scalable and you only pay for what you really use. Therefore, it can be your source for big data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning applications that will help you to gain valuable insights from your data.
Cloud services and SaaS providers can leverage OBS to take advantage of the scalability, flexibility and cost efficiency it provides. Thanks to redundancy within multiple availability zones, you benefit from the highest possible data availability and durability. Available Rest-APIs allow you to develop and deliver your apps within a DevOps model. This ensures your services and applications gain a quick time-to-market and are reliably available to your customers and service consumers.
As a service provider you may need to implement a data backup concept for the services you are delivering to your customers. For implementation purposes, OBS can be a perfect fit. It has a high durability and availability and can simply be accessed via the S3 protocol, making it the ideal destination for your backup data. Your backups will remain in 3 availability zones of the Deutsche Telekom datacenters and fulfill all GDPR requirements. As backups are rarely accessed, cost benefits can be achieved by assigning the Warm or Cold storage class to your backup data.
OBS can be used as a cost-efficient and highly available static website hosting solution. In addition, OBS can be used as storage for your static website or web application content. This means you can separately manage static and dynamic content of your web applications. OBS scales with your demands and delivers a highly available and durable storage solution for your web application content.
* Voucher can be redeemed until December 31, 2023. Please contact us when using the voucher for booking. The discount is only valid for customers with a billing address in Germany and expires two months after conclusion of the contract. The credit is deducted according to the valid list prices as per the service description. Payment of the credit in cash is excluded.
