Orbit is our highly available and durable object storage service. It’s at the centre of so many of our services at Brightbox: all Cloud Server and Cloud SQL snapshots, all our managed customer logs and backups, and of course it is used directly by customers via its HTTP APIs to store various assets.
Orbit is based on the excellent OpenStack Swift project and last year we rolled out some updates that add new features. We also added and upgraded a lot of Orbit hardware that improved performance too.
We moved all container services to SSD which improved latency for most metadata operations considerably, as well as allowing us to improve consistency with faster replication updates.
We were able to increase throughput on the object HDD storage systems and now objects uploads are faster: in particular, larger object uploads are 1.65x faster!
And due to some cache tuning, we’ve also improved read times for “hot” objects.
We’ve got more networking improvements planned for this year which should get us another boost too. We’ll keep you posted.
The Swift API is well supported but we know that the S3 API has become a strong defacto standard for storage systems over the last few years, particularly in the Kubernetes world. Orbit’s S3 compatibility has now been expanded and supports more S3 features and with improved S3 performance.
Temporary URLs allows the creation of a special URL that points to a specific object and allows reads and/or writes to it for a limited amount of time without requiring authentication credentials. This is perfect for when you want to control access to objects via a separate application but still want Orbit to handle the serving of the objects. And you can now limit access to a temporary URL by IP address.
And as ever, Orbit runs on our entirely UK owned and operated infrastructure and stores 3 copies of each object on separate storage devices. Data is encrypted in-flight and at-rest on disk.
You can read and write data to Orbit containers using the standard OpenStack Swift HTTP API, any number of libraries (Ruby, Node, PHP etc), the Swift CLI tool or even our simple SFTP service. Anything that can use OpenStack Swift can use Orbit! We’ve got guides for many tools, such as for the Restic backup tool and Rclone.
You can sign up for Brightbox in just a couple of minutes and use your ÂŁ50 free credit to play with Orbit. Give it a go!
