This free open source version of Scality’s S3 API allows developers to develop and test applications locally. The company also hopes that it will eventually attract them to the regular version of their software.
Jerome Lecat, Scality’s CEO
Object storage vendor Scality has followed up last week’s general availability announcement of the new version of its RING software, which significantly enhanced their commitment to the AWS S3 protocol, with the release of its S3 Server software. This is an open source version of its S3 API.
“The S3 Server is packaged as a Docker container,” said Jerome Lecat, Scality’s CEO. “Making this available as an open source project makes it super simple, requiring only one machine to deploy.”
“We believe that the S3 API has become the right technology for digital business applications, which is why we deepened our own commitment to it,” Lecat said. The problem was that up to now, there has not been a way to develop and test an application for it that can be deployed at web-scale locally. Many organizations want their developers to do this kind of work locally, not on AWS. This is especially the case with small deployments.”
Scality S3 Server solves the problem by letting developers code to the S3 API locally, and to extend the API should they need to do so. Applications developed with the Scality S3 Server will be freely deployable either on premises, or on the AWS cloud, or both, without changing a single line of code.
The Scality S3 Server is written in Node.js and offers rich S3 API features and fast bucket listing. It offers strong S3 API compatibility, allowing application developers to utilize the full set of AWS S3 language-specific bindings and wrappers, including SDKs for Java, .NET, Javascript, and Go, to simplify coding. The new offering uses Docker volumes for storage, and can be used for pilot and production deployment of several hundreds of terabytes.
The Scality S3 Server comes in both free and paid support options, which are available on Docker Hub and Github, and at the Scality S3 Server portal. The Enterprise Edition is available as a subscription for $950 per month, per server.
“The Enterprise Edition is the same code as the free version, but you get technical support from Scality for the subscription cost, whereas support for the free version comes from the community,” Lecat said.
Lecat also acknowledged that making the free open source tool available is designed to get developers and organizations interested in Scality.
“Some have gone to Swift or Ceph because they are free,” he said. “We think this will get them interested in Scality, and ultimately in our RING 6.0.”
The Scality S3 Server is available now.
