From File Systems to the Cloud and Back

Cloud storages today are a terrific alternative to keeping data on local computer or in NAS storage. Started with Amazon S3, such services are provided by a dozen of companies, including Microsoft with their Azure Blob Storage.

The advantages of cloud storage are nearly unlimited storage capability (use as much as you require, not as you have), the range between the storage and your area (the information will not be lost in an accident or fire, and access of 3rd parties to your information is seriously limited), reduced expense of data management.

At the same time cloud storage works in the way that doesn't match regular techniques to storage gain access to, such as hierarchical file systems and relational databases. Internally created as substantial tables with an index and BLOB field for data, they don't provide enough flexibility that file systems or database management systems can provide to the designer and user. The developer requires to carry out translation in between the information he has in the application and the back-end cloud storage.

One more significant disadvantage is a difference in between APIs, used by various services. While the majority of services offer so-called REST API, this API remains in truth a format for demands and actions sent over HTTP. Demand commands, parameters and functions provided by services, vary significantly. Due to this changing in between cloud services requires writing of separate code for each API.

Finally, the main aspect of (in) acceptance of storage based services is a concern of guaranteeing information safety. Though service providers tell us about encryption used on their side, such file encryption is carried out on their systems and there's no assurance that it's really trusted and if it is even performed. So security of the information is a genuine problem and not a fantasy of cloud storage challengers.

Fortunately, there exists a possibility to attend to all of the above problems in a basic and very cost-effective method.

Strong File System (SolFS) offers the missing out on pieces that fit well into cloud storage architecture.

As the majority of file systems, SolFS is page-based. This means that it operates not with random series of bytes, however with blocks (sectors on the disk, pages in memory) of repaired size. This makes it easy to back SolFS with nearly any storage.

To make such backing possible SolFS supports callback mode, in which it asks your application to shop or recover the block to or from the back-end storage. So all you require to do is implement 2 basic functions "put the page #X to the cloud storage" and "retrieve the page #X from the storage" in your code, which's all - you have a file system in the cloud!

However that's not all SolFS can provide. The file system provides numerous sophisticated functions, such as built-in file encryption and compression (performed in your corner, if you keep in mind the cloud security issue referenced above), almost unlimited possibilities for saving metadata (numerous supplementary information about the main file or data), and to carry out SQL-like look for files. Additionally, if you need customized file encryption (eg. utilizing secrets saved on cryptographic hardware tokens), this is possible with two other callbacks - "encrypt page #X" and "decrypt page #X".

And what if you need not a file system, however a relational database? No issues either! You can utilize your preferred DBMS and have it save it's files on the virtual disk, produced by SolFS (System Edition). In this manner the database files are kept in the cloud storage, and your application deals with them by means of database management system of your choice.

One more advantage of SolFS is that moving from one cloud storage service to another is as basic as rewriting 2 fundamental functions for storing and retrieving of pages to and from the cloud storage.

You can state that you still need the code, that works with the cloud. This is proper, but it's much easier to write the code that shops and obtains fixed-sized files (each page has the same size) by page number, than to try to carry out a relational database or a file system in the cloud yourself.

If you don't want to compose cloud-specific code at all, we have a solution for you too. It's CloudBlackbox - the parts that provide consistent access to different cloud storage services. These elements both provide uniform access to cloud storages (Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure at the moment with more to come) and provide enhanced file encryption abilities, such as certificate-based file encryption of data. So if you are relocating to the cloud, you do not need to dispose of established paradigms and existing code. Updating them to modern industry offerings is easy and quick.

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