This topic describes common OSS functions.

Before you start to use OSS, we recommend that you get familiar with some important OSS concepts, including buckets, objects, regions, endpoints, and AccessKey. For more information about these concepts, see Basic concepts.

OSS provides the following functions to address your business needs in different scenarios.

How do I…? Function Reference
Upload files Before you can upload any data to OSS, you must create a bucket in an Alibaba Cloud region to store your data. After you create a bucket, you can upload an unlimited number of data objects to the bucket.
Search for objects You can search for objects in buckets or folders. Search for objects
View and download objects You can use the URL of an object to view and download the object, or share the object with others. Obtain the object URL
Delete objects and folders You can delete a single or multiple objects and folders. You can also delete fragments generated by multipart upload to save your storage space.
Control access permissions for my OSS resources You can use one of the following three methods to manage the access permissions for OSS resources:
  • ACL: Access Control Lists (ACLs) are access policies that grant access permissions to buckets and objects. You can configure the ACL when creating a bucket or uploading an object, and modify the ACL anytime after the bucket is created or the object is uploaded.
  • Bucket policy: You can grant the access permissions for your OSS resources to other users such as RAM users in the console. For example, you can grant the permissions to anonymous users who access OSS resources from specified IP addresses
  • RAM policy: You can create RAM policies to manage the access permissions for your buckets and folders in OSS. OSS provides the RAM policy editor to help you create RAM policies. For more information, see RAM policy editor.
Record the detailed information of requests made to my bucket You can enable logging to automatically record the detailed information of requests made to a bucket. Real-time log query
Prevent data on OSS from being stolen by others You can configure a referer whitelist for a bucket and configure whether to allow access requests with an empty referer field. Set anti-leech
Use my own domain to access the data stored in my OSS bucket You can attach a custom domain to your OSS bucket. Then you can use the custom domain to access data stored in the bucket. You can also enable Alibaba Cloud CDN to speed up the access to the data stored in the bucket. If your domain accesses OSS by using HTTPS, you can host your certificate in OSS.
Use static web pages to access my bucket You can set your bucket to the static website hosting mode and then use the domain associated with your bucket to access the static web pages. Configure static website hosting
Enable my client web applications that are loaded in one domain to interact with resources in another domain OSS provides Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) settings in the HTML5 protocol. CORS allows client web applications that are loaded in one domain to interact with resources in another domain. Configure CORS rules
Automatically delete objects in batches at specific time You can configure lifecycle rules to define actions you want OSS to take during the lifetime of specific objects, for example, transition objects to another storage class, archive them, or delete them after a specified period of time. Manage object lifecycle
Synchronize newly created objects, object updates, and object deletions from one bucket to another bucket in a different region Cross-region replication is the automatic, asynchronous copying of objects across buckets in different regions. It replicates changes (creation, update, and deletion) to objects in the source bucket to the target bucket across different regions. Create cross-region replication rules
Fetch content from the origin store You can create back-to-origin rules to define whether to fetch origin data by mirroring or redirection. Back-to-origin rules are usually used for hot migration of data and redirection of specific requests. Create back-to-origin rules
Encrypt the data to be stored You can use the encryption function provided by the server to encrypt data and saves the encrypted data to OSS. Server-side encryption
Create data retention policies You can create data retention policies and specify a data retention period. Your data cannot be deleted by any users within this period. Introduction
Configure the zone-disaster recovery solution You can store your data in the three multiple availability zones (AZs) of your region. You can still access your data in the case that one AZ becomes faulty. This enables OSS to provide 99.9999999999% data reliability and 99.995% data availability. Redundant storage across zones
Modify HTTP headers You can set HTTP headers to customize HTTP request policies, such as cache and forced file download policies. Set object HTTP headers
View resource usage You can view real-time information about OSS service usage, such as the status and performance of basic system operations. Monitoring service overview
Process images stored in OSS You can perform different operations on the images stored in OSS, such as format conversion, cropping, scaling, rotation, watermarks, and style encapsulation. Image processing
Use tools to manage OSS resources OSS provides a wide range of tools such as graphical, CLI, file mounting, and FTP file transfer tools to help you manage OSS resources. OSS tools
Use APIs and SDKs to manage OSS resources OSS provides RESTful APIs and SDKs for the most popular programming languages to help you with secondary development.