About a year ago, we announced the production availability of the third generation of our decentralized cloud object storage service. The service represented a huge leap forward in our radically different approach to traditional centralized cloud storage with better privacy, security, availability, and economics. Today, we’re announcing the production availability of our new cloud-hosted S3-compatible gateway service for developers, along with a host of new architectural improvements. All of these updates should represent a similarly huge leap forward in terms of privacy, security, resilience, S3 compatibility, usability, performance, economics, and supported use cases.
With this release, we now offer a globally available, multi-region hosted S3-compatible gateway, including support for new features like multipart upload, a web interface for advanced access management, and easy drag and drop interface for secure, private file sharing.
In the year since we launched the platform’s current generation, we’ve received a lot of feedback. The best source of product feedback is from the customers and partners actually using the product in the wild, and here’s what we’ve consistently heard developers love about the platform:
- The highest degree of privacy delivered through end-to-end encrypted data and metadata, along with our commitment to protecting the privacy of users and their data
- Superior security provided by the decentralized and distributed architecture, edge-based delegated authorization, and access management
- The high availability provided by a distributed and decentralized network of over 12,000 Storage Nodes
- Easy integration via an S3-compatible gateway that anyone could run and connect to the network
- The excellent performance from parallel, peer-to-peer transfers
- Superior economics that is less than half the price of comparable cloud storage services
Of course, developers also gave us feedback not just on what they liked but also on where they wanted to see more improvement, including the following:
- We can never have enough focus on privacy—decentralized applications are truly differentiated on privacy
- Provide more flexibility on security and encryption and make it easier to take advantage of the edge-based delegated authorization and access management
- Make all the components of the network as resilient and highly available as the data stored on Storage Nodes
- Make it even easier to use and more S3 compatible by adding support for more features like multipart upload, and provide a cloud-hosted S3-compatible endpoint
- Make it faster for uploads and downloads
- Make it even more economically compelling
It was all great feedback, but it was a lot of feedback. If we just implemented those requests, almost all of our engineering efforts toward our roadmap would have taken over. So what did we do? We turned it up to 11. Our product and engineering teams are driven to deliver product developers will love, and they’ve over-delivered on all of the product requests and then some. Just to give you an idea of what’s included in this current release:
- Even more privacy: We’ve removed all third party tracking tools and increased the privacy for our end-users and their applications.
- Even more security: We’ve made the access management tools much easier to use by providing a simple web interface. The web interface allows you to create Access Grants with granular levels of access to buckets, paths, and even objects for our S3 gateway and other tools/applications.
- Even more resiliency: All of the components of our network now include multi-region availability by default—not just Storage Nodes but Satellites and gateways, meaning there is no single point of failure anywhere on the network.
- Even more S3-compatible: We now offer globally distributed, cloud-hosted S3-compatible gateways and an easy web interface for creating and managing gateway access credentials, including granular access controls based on bucket, path, object, permissions, and date/time restrictions. We’ve also added support for even more popular features like multipart upload and a web interface for uploading and sharing objects.
- Even faster: Improvements to the underlying architecture, the addition of multi-region support, and the introduction of the hosted gateways have significantly improved performance and consistency.
- Even more economical: With this release, we’re now the most economical cloud storage option on the market—more than 80% more affordable than other cloud services, with no exorbitant egress fees, complex cost structures, or extra costs for multi-region that tend to lock users in.
- Even more integrations: This additional new architecture makes it far easier to integrate with Storj. We’re coming out of the gate with new connectors for Duplicati and and support for virtually any S3-compatible service, and participants in our Open Source Partner Program will find it even easier to create integrations that enable easy monetization of open source.
- Even better for multi-cloud: Our new Gateway MT is hosted in Equinix, which has peering relationships with all major cloud providers. So, if you’d like to transfer data that you’ve already got in a public cloud, or if you want to do compute/data creation in another cloud and transfer it to us, it should be far faster and less expensive.
- Even more supported use cases: The new architecture opens up a set of use cases (e.g., building web applications, content distribution) that were hard to implement with a locally hosted gateway.
- Even more options: While we think many people will love the new hosted gateway, we know that some developers prefer the local option or find it a better fit for their use cases. Rest assured that the local gateway is still 100% supported and will still get all the other benefits that come with this release, including multi-region Satellites, enhanced security/privacy, and...of course..improved economics
But wait, there’s more! There’s so much in this release; really, the best thing to do is sign up for a free account and try it for yourself. With 150 GB of free storage and bandwidth per month, you can definitely determine what decentralized cloud storage can do for you.
