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Object Storage Service:OSS

Last Updated:May 12, 2023

Object Storage Service (OSS) is a secure, cost-effective, cloud-based storage solution that provides highly durable storage for large volumes of data. OSS is designed to provide data durability of at least 99.9999999999% (twelve 9's) and service availability of at least 99.995%. OSS supports RESTful API operations that do not need to be performed in the OSS console. You can store and access data from all applications anytime and anywhere.

Storage classes

OSS provides the following storage classes to cover various data storage scenarios from hot data to cold data: Standard, IA, Archive, and Cold Archive.

Standard

Standard storage provides highly reliable, highly available, and high-performance object storage services that can process frequent data access. Standard storage is suitable for images that are used for social networking and sharing applications, and data of audio and video applications, large websites, and big data analysis.

IA

IA storage provides highly durable storage services at lower prices compared with Standard storage. IA objects have a minimum storage period of 30 days and a minimum billable size of 64 KB. You can access IA objects in real time. You are charged data retrieval fees when you access IA objects. IA storage is suitable for data that is infrequently accessed, such as once or twice a month.

Archive

Archive storage provides highly durable storage services at lower prices compared with Standard storage and IA storage. Archive objects have a minimum storage period of 60 days and a minimum billable size of 64 KB. You must restore an Archive object before you can access it. The amount of time that is required to restore an Archive object is approximately one minute. You are charged data retrieval fees when you restore Archive objects. Archive storage is suitable for data that needs to be stored for a long period of time, such as archival data, medical images, scientific materials, and video footage.

Cold Archive

Cold Archive storage provides highly durable storage services at lower prices compared with Archive storage. Cold Archive objects have a minimum storage period of 180 days and a minimum billable size of 64 KB. You must restore a Cold Archive object before you can access it. The amount of time that is required to restore a Cold Archive object varies based on the object size and the restoration mode. You are charged data retrieval fees when you restore Cold Archive objects. Cold Archive storage is suitable for cold data that needs to be stored for an extended period of time, including data that must be retained for an extended period of time to meet compliance requirements, raw data that is accumulated over an extended period of time in the big data and AI fields, retained media resources in the film and television industries, and archived videos in the online education industry.

For more information about the storage classes, see Overview.

Scenarios

OSS is applicable to the following scenarios:

  • Storage and distribution of audio, video, and static website data

    OSS generates a unique HTTP URL for each object, which is used to distribute the object. In addition, OSS buckets can be used as the origins for Alibaba Cloud CDN. The storage space of OSS is not partitioned. Therefore, OSS is suitable for storing data of user-generated content websites and data-intensive websites, such as image and video sharing websites. You can use various devices, websites, and mobile applications to read data from or write data to OSS. You can write data to OSS by uploading files or using streams.

  • Static website hosting

    OSS provides a cost-effective, highly available, and highly scalable storage solution. OSS can be used to store static HTML files, images, videos, and client scripts such as JavaScript scripts.

  • Data warehouse for computing and analysis

    OSS provides horizontal scalability to allow you to simultaneously access data from multiple computing nodes.

  • Data backup and archiving

    OSS provides a highly available, scalable, secure, and reliable solution for the backup and archiving of critical data. You can configure lifecycle rules to convert the storage class of cold data to IA or Archive to reduce your storage costs. You can also configure cross-region replication (CRR) rules to replicate data between buckets in different regions in an asynchronous manner in near real time.

Performance

To achieve the fastest speed when you access an OSS bucket from your Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance, the ECS instance must be located in the same region as the bucket. Based on the manner in which OSS is designed, the latency at the server side is negligible compared with the network latency. When you store data for web applications, OSS performs better because it provides scalability for the storage capacity, number of requests, and number of users. If you use multiple threads, applications, or clients to simultaneously access OSS, the total throughput of OSS is scaled to a value greater than the throughput that can be provided or consumed by a single server.

OSS provides the multipart upload feature to improve the upload speed of objects larger than 5 GB in size. When you use multipart upload, you can split an object into multiple parts and upload the parts separately. After all parts are uploaded, OSS combines these parts into a complete object. You can use the multipart upload feature to implement resumable upload. Multipart upload is suitable for scenarios in which network connectivity is poor. If a part fails to be uploaded, you can reupload only the failed part instead of the whole object.

To accelerate data access, many developers use OSS together with search engines such as OpenSearch or databases such as Tablestore and RDS for MySQL. OSS is used to store data, whereas search engines or databases are used to store metadata, such as object names, object sizes, and keywords. Metadata stored in databases can be indexed and queried. When you use OSS together with search engines or databases, you can precisely locate and query objects stored in OSS.

OSS provides the transfer acceleration feature to accelerate the upload and download of remote large objects. This allows you to dynamically update objects and accelerate the download of objects that are not frequently accessed. The transfer acceleration feature provides an end-to-end acceleration solution by combining smart scheduling, protocol stack tuning, optimal route selection, and transfer algorithm optimization with OSS server-side configurations.

OSS supports Alibaba Cloud CDN to accelerate the download of static hot objects. Alibaba Cloud CDN uses OSS buckets as origins and distributes content from the origins to points of presence (POPs). Alibaba Cloud CDN uses its precise scheduling system to distribute requests to optimal POPs and allow users to quickly access the required content. This way, Internet traffic congestion can be eased and the response time is shortened.

Data durability and service availability

OSS provides the zone-redundant storage (ZRS) feature. ZRS uses the multi-zone mechanism to distribute user data across multiple zones in the same region. If one zone becomes unavailable, you can continue to access the data that is stored in other zones. This mechanism can provide 99.9999999999% (twelve 9's) data durability and 99.995% service availability.

You can also enable cross-region replication (CRR) for a specific bucket. After you enable CRR, data is replicated between buckets in different regions in an asynchronous manner in near real time. The source bucket and destination bucket can both provide 99.9999999999% (twelve 9's) data durability and 99.995% service availability.

Scalability and elasticity

OSS provides high scalability and elasticity. You may encounter problems when you store an excessive number of files in the same directory in a common file system. In contrast, the total storage capacity of OSS and the capacity of a single OSS bucket are not limited. You can store an unlimited number of objects in a bucket. OSS stores the replicas of your data in different servers on the same region. All replicas have the same performance provided by the high-performance infrastructure of Alibaba Cloud.

Security

OSS provides various security features such as server-side encryption, client-side encryption, hotlink protection based on Referer whitelists, fine-grained access control, log audit, and retention policies based on the Write Once Read Many (WORM) retention policy. OSS is the only cloud service in the Chinese mainland that SS is accredited and audited by Cohasset Associates and meets specific requirements for electronic data storage. OSS buckets configured with retention policies can be used for business that is subject to regulations such as SEC Rule 17a-4(f), CFTC Rule 1.31(c)-(d), and FINRA Rule 4511(c). For more information, see Overview.

Operations

OSS provides standard RESTful API operations. You can use these API operations to store objects in buckets whose names are globally unique. Each object has a key that uniquely identifies the object in the bucket. OSS does not use directories. All elements are stored as objects. However, you can create a simulated directory by creating an object whose name ends with a forward slash (/), such as folder1/folder2/file.

You can use tools or OSS SDKs that encapsulate the API operations to develop applications. OSS provides OSS SDKs for more than 10 programming languages, including Java, Python, PHP, Go, Android, and iOS. ossutil is a high-performance command-line tool that provides various simple commands, such as ls, cp, cat, and config. You can use the commands to manage buckets and objects. ossutil supports concurrent upload and is supported by the following operating systems: Windows, Linux, and macOS. In addition, you can use the graphic tool ossbrowser to perform basic operations, such as browsing objects and uploading or downloading objects and directories. You can also use the OSS console, which is a graphic web application, to manage your OSS resources.

You can use the event notification feature to immediately learn about the operations performed on your OSS resources. For more information, see Overview.

Billing methods

OSS fees include storage fees, traffic fees, API operation calling fees, and data processing fees. OSS charges fees based on the actual amount of resources that are used. The fees that are generated in an hour are billed in the following hour. Fees are calculated based on the following formula: Fees = Actual usage × Unit price. You can select the subscription billing method for specific billable items to reduce your storage costs. Subscription allows you to use resources only after you purchase resource plans. Resource plans are used to offset fees that are generated by resource usage. For more information, see Billing overview.