Three Object Stores: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

AWS S3 Object Storage

I have been looking at the different Object storage cloud services.  Don't worry if you don't know what Object storage is, only think of it as a way to store lots of buckets or containers.  These  buckets or containers are only one level deep.  This makes them very cheap and its the better way to store you documents online that are write once and read many.  So documents getting lots of read and writes should stay in SharePoint, but these documents may get lots of reads, like a web site or massive backup or archive store.

I won't go on and on like I sometimes do at home about all the great things Object storage can do.  I will just give you an overview as kind of a power user and designer.

Above is the AWS S3 storage for Object storage.  It sets the standards, look at all those ready to configure features.  You can directly host as a static web page, and that means JavaScript web page people.  And rules to lower cost storage right there, what is there not to love.

IBM Bluemix Object Storage, and little else

IBM  Bluemix has a nice Object Storage with a nice overview interface, tells you how much the Enterprise is storing is nice.  But beyond that its not much really.

Okay I know this is Azure, and it seems I will need to pay something now

I don't know what to think about storage in Azure.  I think this above is how you would set up Azures alternative to AWS Object storage.  Really I am not sure and I am going to have to pay something to find out.  This I think comes just as part of Microsoft double strategy of hybrid Cloud and Platform to Services a Service patterns.  Though Object store is a Platform it is a pretty low level one, now much consulting revenue down the road and Microsoft indifference to this space shows.  

What I first though when I started looking at Cloud storage is that outside of SQL server Microsoft had one answer: Office 365 especially OneDrive and SharePoint Online.

To be just OneDrive does offer an answer and an answer that probably will work most of the time.  The focus is more on the customers.  Object storage is in a way a competition to Office and SharePoint.  I could very well skip rolling out full Office 365 to give my users Object storage spaces.  I would myself first load massive shared files of little understood value in Object storage rather than OneDrive.

And at this point, Object Storage is Amazon Web Services. 

And the future of data store? 

Okay here is the prize, a wild speculation on the kind of data store you could make here.  A massive data store with the files entirely store in JSON.  A node set of bots.  The bots can handle all channels of request, from simple enterprise search and ECM storage to voice requests or IM requests, to email help systems.  You can have your companies main data in semi-structured form accessible via a wide range of channels and enhanced with cognitive technology or running Spark machine learning applications.