Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service – OSS

Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service (OSS) is a storage service that enables you to store, back up, and archive any amount of data in the cloud.

Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service (OSS) is a storage service that enables you to store, back up, and archive any amount of data in the cloud. OSS is a cost-effective, highly secure, and highly reliable cloud storage solution. It uses RESTful APIs and provides 99.9999999999% (12 nines) durability and 99.995% availability or service continuity.

Storage class

Alibaba Cloud OSS provides three storage classes: Standard, Infrequent Access (IA), and Archive. These storage classes cover various data storage scenarios from hot data to cold data. OSS Standard storage provides highly reliable, highly available, and high-performance object storage services that support frequent data access. OSS IA storage is suitable for storing long-lived, but less frequently accessed data (an average of once or twice per month). IA storage offers a storage unit price that is lower than Standard storage. OSS Archive storage has the lowest price among the three storage classes. It is suitable for long-term storage (at least half a year) of data that is infrequently accessed.

Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service - Cloud Data

Standard

OSS Standard storage provides highly reliable, highly available, and high-performance object storage services that support frequent data access. The high-throughput and low-latency service response capability of OSS can effectively support access to hotspot data. Standard storage is ideal for storing various images that are used for social networking and sharing, and storing data for audio and video applications, large websites, and big data analytics.

  • Supported data redundancy mechanisms
    • Locally redundant storage (LRS): uses the data redundancy storage mechanism to store data of each object on multiple devices in the same region, ensuring data durability and availability in case of hardware failure.
    • Zone-redundant storage (ZRS): uses the multi-zone mechanism to distribute user data across three zones within the same region. Even if one zone becomes unavailable, the data will still be accessible.
  • Key features
    • Provides 99.9999999999% (twelve 9’s) data durability (designed for).
    • Provides 99.995% service availability (designed for).
    • Delivers high-throughput and low-latency access performance.
    • Supports HTTPS-based transmission.
    • Supports Image Processing (IMG).

IA

OSS IA storage is suitable for storing long-lived, but less frequently accessed data (an average of once or twice per month). IA storage offers a storage unit price that is lower than Standard storage, and is suitable for long-term backup of various mobile apps, smart device data, and enterprise data. It also supports real-time data access. Objects of the IA storage class have a minimum storage duration. Fees occur if you delete objects that are stored for less than 30 days. Objects of the IA storage class have a minimum billable size. Objects smaller than 64 KB are charged as 64 KB. Data retrieval incurs fees.

  • Supported data redundancy mechanisms
    • Locally redundant storage (LRS): uses the data redundancy storage mechanism to store data of each object on multiple devices in the same region, ensuring data durability and availability in case of hardware failure.
    • Zone-redundant storage (ZRS): uses the multi-zone mechanism to distribute user data across three zones within the same region. Even if one zone becomes unavailable, the data will still be accessible.
  • Key features
    • Provides 99.9999999999% (twelve 9’s) data durability (designed for).
    • Provides 99.995% service availability (designed for).
    • Supports real-time access.
    • Supports HTTPS-based transmission.
    • Supports IMG.
    • Requires a minimum storage duration and minimum billable size.

Archive

OSS Archive storage has the lowest price among the three storage classes. It is suitable for long-term storage (at least half a year) of data that is infrequently accessed. The data may take up to one minute to restore before it can be read. This storage option is suitable for data such as archival data, medical images, scientific materials, and video footage. Objects of the Archive storage class have a minimum storage period. Fees occur if you delete objects that are stored for less than 60 days. Objects of the Archive storage class have a minimum billable size. Objects smaller than 64 KB are charged as 64 KB. Data retrieval incurs fees.

The Archive storage class has the following features:

  • Provides 99.999999999% (eleven 9’s) data durability (designed for).
  • Provides 99.99% service availability (designed for).
  • Takes about one minute to restore the data from the frozen state to the readable state.
  • Supports HTTPS-based transmission.
  • Supports IMG, but data needs to be restored first.
  • Requires a minimum storage duration and minimum billable size.

Comparison of storage classes

Item Standard IA Archive
Supported data redundancy mechanisms LRS and ZRS LRS and ZRS N/A
Data durability (designed for) 99.9999999999% (twelve 9’s) 99.9999999999% (twelve 9’s) 99.999999999% (eleven 9’s)
Service availability (designed for) 99.995% 99.995% 99.99% (restored data)
Minimum billable size of objects Actual size of objects 64 KB 64 KB
Minimum storage duration No minimum storage duration 30 days 60 days
Data retrieval fee No data retrieval fee Based on the size of retrieved data. Unit: GB Based on the size of restored data. Unit: GB
Data access Real-time access with low latency (within milliseconds) Real-time access with low latency (within milliseconds) One minute after data is restored
IMG Supported Supported Supported after data is restored

 

Bucket

A bucket is a container for objects stored in OSS. Every object is contained in a bucket. You can configure various properties of a bucket, including the region, ACL, and storage class. You can create buckets of different storage classes to store data based on your requirement.

Object

Objects, also known as files, are the fundamental entities stored in OSS. An object is composed of metadata, data, and key. The key is the unique object name in a bucket. Metadata defines the attributes of an object, such as the time last modified and the object size. You can also specify custom metadata of an object.

Region

A region indicates the physical location of an OSS data center. You can select the region where your buckets are created based on the cost and the location where the requests come from.

Endpoint

An endpoint is the domain name used to access the OSS. OSS provides external services through HTTP RESTful APIs. Different regions use different endpoints. For the same region, access through an intranet or through the Internet also uses different endpoints.

AccessKey

An AccessKey (AK) is composed of an AccessKeyId and an AccessKeySecret. They work in pairs to perform access identity verification. OSS verifies the identity of a request sender by using the AccessKeyId/AccessKeySecret symmetric encryption method. The AccessKeyId is used to identify a user. The AccessKeySecret is used for the user to encrypt the signature and for OSS to verify the signature. The AccessKeySecret must be kept confidential. The AccessKeyId is used to identify the user. The AccessKeySecret is the key used by the user to encrypt the signature string and the OSS to verify the signature string, which must be kept confidential.

 

 

Related services

After you upload your data to OSS, you can use it with other Alibaba Cloud products and services.

The following services are frequently used with OSS:

Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service - Related Services

Image processing service (IMG)

A service that allows you to perform various operations on images stored in OSS, including format converting, resizing, cropping, rotating, and adding watermarks.

Elastic Compute Service (ECS)

A cloud computing service that offers elastic and efficient computing capability. Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) provides fast memory and the latest Intel CPUs to help you to power your cloud applications and achieve faster results with low latency.

Alibaba Cloud CDN:

A content delivery service that caches the resources on the original site to edge nodes in different regions for quick access.

E-MapReduce:

A big data processing system solution built on ECS. It is based on Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark to facilitate your data analysis and processing.

ApsaraVideo Media Processing:

A cloud service that converts audio and video stored in OSS into formats suitable for playing on PCs, TVs, and mobile devices. On the basis of deep learning of large amounts of data, it performs multi-model analysis based on the content, text, audio, scenario of audio/video files; it is able to intelligently detect, understand, and edit content.

 

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