It has been a great pleasure to be part of the review process of Implementing

Cloud Storage with OpenStack Swift Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Object Storage, we all are using in some form or the other while using web and its

market adoption is getting new high's everyday with many block storage vendors

also providing the object storage capabilities. The book authored by Amar

Kapadia, Sreedhar Varma, Kris Rajana gives particular insights into the

OpenStack Swift project. It not only describes what Swift is but also provides a lot

of internals around it.

Chapter 1, Cloud Storage – Why Can't I be Like Google?, covers why cloud

storage is a new way to build storage systems that cuts the total cost of ownership

significantly. It describes the object storage in detail and why to consider is

OpenStack Swift. Gives insights into OpenStack Swift as how its a different

architecture than traditional enterprise storage systems by using a distributed

architecture on commodity servers.

Chapter 2: OpenStack Swift Architecture, covers the OpenStack Swift

architecture details in terms of logical organization of objects and implementation.

How Swit takes a set of commodity servers and creates a reliable and scalable

storage system that is simple to manage. It describes Swift differenciation in terms

of data path and control path, its Auth model, replication schemes and other

details. The chapter also discuss about some additional features not generally

discussed with respect to OpenStack Swift

Moving to Chapter 3: Installing OpenStack Swift, provides instructions to

install and set up the OpenStack Swift service to provide object storage, and install

and set up the Keystone service to provide authentication for users to access Swift

object store.

Whats the use of installing a product when you cannot use it, extend it.Chapter 4:

Using Swift, provides the how to use various Swift clients to interact with Swift

clusters and get information on accounts, containers, and objects. You were

introduced to ACLs, large object transfers, and also to various Swift client libraries

that can be used to write applications in your desired language such as Java, Ruby,

and Python.

How to manage a Swift cluster, the various tools available to monitor and manage

the Swift cluster, and the various metrics to determine the health of the cluster,

what actions need to be taken

if a component fails in the cluster and how a cluster can be extended by adding

new disks and nodes, can be learned in Chapter 5: Managing Swift.

Chapter 6: Choosing the Right Hardware, deals with the most critical part of

any deployment in terms of Optimization as well as Scale. It takes you through

complex process of selecting hardware for an

OpenStack Swift installation and the various trade-offs that can be made. Network

hardware, elasticity, gateway setups all are discussed in detail.

How good is your OpenStack Swift deployment, how benchmarking parameters

can be obtained, how they can be improved. What are the hardware/software

tuning parameters to consider with respect to private as well as public clouds is

discussed in detail in Chapter 7: Tuning Your Swift Installation.

This is all so very good, At this point, we hope you have a good idea of what cloud

storage is and how OpenStack can be used to create cloud storage. We hope you

are confident in terms of how to install, manage, and use OpenStack Swift,

including some finer points such as hardware selection and performance tuning.

Chapter 8: Additional Resources deals with how OpenStack Swift is relevant to

every user segment, from the individual consumer to the large service provider.

Service providers offer value added public clouds, Web2.0s build private clouds to

house all their user data, and enterprises use public clouds and create private

secure clouds to archive their data and run analytics.

The Appendix section provides the necessary help for any user to get started with

OpenStack Swift CLI.

It is now time to get involved with the OpenStack Swift community as a

user, contributor, or evangelist.

The book is available in both eBook and Print versions from Packt Publishing.