Get up and running with OpenStack Swift, the free, open source solution for deploying high-performance object storage clusters at scale. In this practical guide, Joe Arnold, co-founder and CEO of SwiftStack, brings you up-to-speed on the basic concepts of object storage and walks you through what you need to know to plan, build, operate, and measure the performance of your own Swift storage system.

Object storage is essential today with the growth of web, mobile, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. This book helps you through the process, with separate sections on application development, installation, administration, and troubleshooting.

• Learn Swift’s concepts for organizing, distributing, and serving data
• Explore basic and advanced features of the Swift RESTful API
• Delve into Swift’s many client libraries, including useful Python features
• Write middleware to customize and simplify your storage system
• Understand requirements for planning a Swift deployment—including your specific use case
• Learn options for coaxing the best performance from your cluster
• Get best practices for daily operations, such as monitoring and planning capacity additions
• Pick up techniques for testing and benchmarking your Swift cluster

Table of Contents

Part I. Fundamentals and Architecture

Chapter 1. The Evolution of Storage

Chapter 2. Meet Swift

Chapter 3. Swift's Data Model and Architecture

Chapter 4. Swift Basics

Part II. Application Design with Swift

Chapter 5. Overview of the Swift API

Chapter 6. Swift Client Libraries

Chapter 7. Advanced API Features

Chapter 8. Developing Swift Middleware

Part Ill. Installing Swift

Chapter 9. Installing OpenStack Swift from Source

Chapter 10. Installing SwiftStack

Part IV. Planning a Swift Deployment

Chapter 11 . Hardware for Swift

Chapter 12. Planning a Swift Deployment

Chapter 13. Authentication and Authorization

Chapter 14. Cluster Tuning and Optimization

Chapter 15. Operating a Swift Cluster

Part V. Debugging and Troubleshooting

Chapter 16. Hardware Failures and Recovery

Chapter 17. Benchmarking

About the Author

Joe Arnold is co-founder and CEO of SwiftStack, a leading provider ofobject storage software. An innovator in cloud-computinginfrastructure, Joe has been examining, addressing, and buildingsolutions that help move today's cloud reality forward when it comesto speed, scale, and power. He built one of the first widely-usedcloud platforms-as-a-service (PaaS) on top of Amazon Web Services atEngine Yard, managed the first public OpenStack launch of Swift afterits release as an open source project. He has subsequently deployedmultiple large-scale cloud storage systems. While at Engine Yard, headditionally oversaw the development of their Ruby on Rails deploymentplatform, AppCloud and managing the open source efforts of Rails 3,JRuby and Rubinius. Joe has been active in the OpenStack communitysince 2010. He has also authored a popular book on yo-yo techniquescalled “From Beginner to Spinner.