PowerScale OneFS 9.8.0.0 Web Administration Guide

S3 concepts

This section describes some of the key concepts related to the S3 protocol.

Buckets: A bucket is a container for objects stored in S3. Every object is contained in a bucket. Buckets organize the S3 namespace at the highest level, identify the account responsible for storage and data transfer charges, and play a role in access control.

Objects: Objects are the fundamental entities stored in S3. An object is uniquely identified within a bucket by a key name and version ID. Objects consist of object data, metadata and others. Key is the object name, value is the data portion that is not visible by users, and metadata is the data about the data and is a set of name-value pairs that describe the object for example, content-type, size, last modified. Custom metadata can also be specified at the time the object is stored.

Keys: A key is the unique identifier for an object within a bucket. Every object in a bucket has a key and a value.

An Account ID and a secret key are used to authenticate a user. The Account ID and secret key are created by the Administrator and mapped to users (such as UNIX, AD, LDAP, and so on).