There is a lot of interest around REST Web Services Cloud Storage APIs, and for good reason.  With the emergence of Cloud Storage, Service Providers recognize that a new service-oriented architecture (SOA) storage infrastructure has emerged – one that allows them to extend the capabilities and services far beyond what is offered by traditional storage.  It is also clear that REST APIs provide this extensibility versus other access methods such as NFS, CIFS and WebDAV. 

REST Cloud Storage APIs expose programmable access to storage and are uniquely language independent.  REST APIs are the choice of Web developers who are creating Web 2.0 applications, contemplating future functionality and how it can be exploited for extending current Web applications, and creating new Web applications.

Cloud Storage defined is storage accessible via a network.  REST reflects the architecture of the Web, meaning it is very efficient and Web-like in its nature.  First, it is stateless, which provides for storage access in the unpredictable and highly latent networks that comprise the Internet.  The Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform is a stateless Linux implementation; therefore, REST APIs are the obvious choice for the Mezeo server.  Second, it is highly efficient, enabling Web scale by allowing many clients to interact with many servers against a pool of objects.  REST allows interactions via a network to occur with a minimum of overhead.  REST also accommodates caching at both the client and the server, which can dramatically improve efficiency.

While there are other access methods that are often associated with Cloud Storage access (NFS, CIFS and WebDav), they are not optimal when the storage is accessed via the Web.   NFS and CIFS are not particularly usable via an Internet connection.  The behavior of these access methods does not accommodate the unique latency of Internet access, and a potentially complex configuration of firewalls is needed to allow this sort of traffic. Utilizing HTTP as the transport for REST means that the firewall requirements are the same as those to access the Web.  While WebDAV is useful for an Internet connection, it (as do NFS and CIFS) only supports traditional file operations such as store and retrieve, versus the robust set of services that Web Services APIs can deliver.