JOSS and OpenStack Swift. All very nice, but with no service provider in the Netherlands, a bit of a moot point. Not any more, though. If you have your e-business in the Netherlands, it might be interesting for you to know that OpenStack Swift is now available here, brought to you by CloudVPS.
For those who do not know OpenStack Swift: it is a cloud-based storage solution. You send your files to a REST API, and Swift makes sure the content is stored over multiple nodes and available for download, taking into account your security preferences. It is often compared to Amazon S3, with the big difference that Swift is Open Source. This solution is interesting to look at for complex web applications, as an alternative to Content Distribution Networks, or to run hundreds of static websites.
42 has always been an advocate of Open Source solutions, so we started the JavaSwift initiative and made this freely available under a business-friendly license. Currently, JavaSwift features a full fledged Java library (JOSS) and a graphical OpenStack (non-S3) browser (Cloudie).
JOSS has been used in a commercial project and is currently powering a high-traffic website with low latency images. The customer only requires a relatively small VPS with not a lot of GBs HDD, keeping them agile and quick to restore. The images are stored with SEO-compliant names, effectively turning the images into an extra entrance for visitors to find the customer's assets. Also, since the browser directly downloads the content from the ObjectStore, and not from the application server, the server is not burdened with extra load. The solution works like a charm, more so since the server operates from the Netherlands. All content is duplicated thrice, and the ObjectStore serves its content from the nodes with the lowest latency.
If you are a Java developer and you feel that the generous CloudVPS offer to use the ObjectStore might be interesting for you, you might consider giving JOSS a spin as well. If you are into Test-Driven Development and you also believe that you should be able to work on a mocked dependency, you might like it even more, since JOSS has a full-fledged simulation mode for the ObjectStore. You just toggle a mock setting to run it all in-memory. Compare it to the way you would run against an in-memory database -- there is a time you want the full monty, but there is also a time you want to concentrate on getting your code out without having the extra hassle. JOSS is made and designed by Java developers for Java developers.
We live in interesting times and I hope you share our enthousiasm for this powerful piece of Cloud technology that is OpenStack Swift.
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