With the growing adoption of cloud storage, a new service-oriented architecture (SOA) storage infrastructure has emerged. REST cloud storage APIs are the choice of Web developers creating Web applications. REST APIs are Web tolerant and enable developers to extend the capabilities and services far beyond what is offered by traditional storage – with advanced services such as secure sharing and collaboration.
REST APIs provide programmable access to storage and are uniquely language independent. There are other access methods that are often associated with cloud storage access (such as NFS, CIFS and WebDAV), but these are not optimal when the storage is accessed via the Web. The reasons are:
- REST is stateless and accommodates the unique latency of Internet access and a potentially complex configuration of firewalls.
- REST is highly efficient, enabling Web scale by allowing many clients to interact with many servers against a pool of objects and interactions via a network to occur with a minimum of overhead.
- REST accommodates caching at both the client and the server, which can dramatically improve efficiency.
While WebDAV is useful for an Internet connection, it (as are NFS and CIFS) it only supports traditional file operations such as store and retrieve, versus the robust set of services that Web Services APIs can deliver.
Mezeo APIs
The MezeoCloud storage platform is a stateless Linux implementation; therefore, REST APIs were the logical choice for the Mezeo server. Mezeo offers two REST APIs: the Mezeo Cloud Storage API enables advanced services and programmatic access to Mezeo enabled storage clouds, and the Mezeo Interoperability API enables seamless interoperability of applications developed for other storage clouds such as Amazon S3 and Eucalyptus.
Cloud Interoperability
A key concern of enterprises building their cloud strategy today is cloud interoperability. In other words, selecting flexible solutions that allow them to integrate private and public clouds in the future, or creating “universal interoperability.”
Mezeo has addressed this need with our Interoperability API, which allows developers to create a single integration to multiple storage clouds. At a business level, this translates into more flexibility, more functionality and more options.
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