We've been offering public object store services for roughly half a year now. In the past few months, we received a wide range of responses from our customers. Tech-savvy customers are very happy with this offering, and quite a few are busy migrating their existing storage solutions to our object store.
However, we find that several customers, especially those coming from shared hosting solutions, struggle to grasp the abstract ideas behind object storage. They struggle with two things: authentication against keystone, which they consider too complicated, and having a user interface that is totally distinct from the actual object store. To help these users, we've developed two middleware projects: swift_basicauth and better_staticweb. swift_basicauth allows web browsers and general purpose HTTP clients to access object stores, without having to contact keystone. The middleware interprets the authentication, and then fetches a token based on that authentication. With that token, the rest of the request is processed. This enables a wide range of HTTP clients to access the object store. While the primary aim was unlocking the objectstore for web-browsers, we quickly discovered the convenience of using it with curl: "curl --user uid:pwd -X PUT " https://static.example.net/the_file"; -T the_file". The second middleware we developed was named better_staticweb (sorry for the pretentious name). It is similar to static-web, in fact is is mostly compatible. However, web-listings is enabled by default, even for authenticated access (useful in combination with basic auth). It enables the user to visualize his object store as a less-abstract concept. Better_staticweb looks at the http Accept header to determine whether or not to respond with a listing. It still listens to the same meta-headers, but it assumes different defaults. We've gone through quite a bit of testing to guarantee that it doesn't interfere with regular API usage. Both middleware projects are released under the Apache 2.0 licence, and can be found on our github page: https://github.com/CloudVPS/better-staticweb https://github.com/CloudVPS/swift-basicauth -- Koert van der Veer - Senior Developer @ CloudVPS CloudVPS - High Availability Cloud Solutions w: http://www.cloudvps.com/ m: ko...@cloudvps.com
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