In a few weeks we are going to release Object Mount. This means it is time for a final test round. If you like to try it here is the download link: object-mount-builds | Storj
To run it you need a license. We have granted a free license to all existing storj customers. All you need to do is open the satellite UI and navigate to object mount. There you can create S3 credentials. These S3 credentials are normal credentials just with a pre defined name. So you can as well create the S3 credentials the normal way. That will work as well.
Everything else is hopefully self explaining. Let me know if you have any questions.
I guess I can write a bit more for everyone that doesn’t have the time or chance to try it.
Object Mount is just awesome. It lets you mount your cloud storage as a local drive but in a very smart way. It has a local cache. The first download will be as fast as the storj network can manage and after that the file is cached. Also a file can be pinned to cache it in advance for applications that require fast local storage. Object Mount can handle that and for these applications it will look like the mounted drive is a local drive.
Furthermore Object Mount is content and application aware. For example if you want to do some video editing Object Mount only downloads the frames that the video editing software needs to work. So just a few frames for the timeline. Once the video editing task is finished and it is time to write the final output file even that can be done server side. The trick here is server side part copy. Basically Object Mount tells the gateway to download the first few minutes of one video file and combine that with parts of other files and commit that as a new file. It still requires the gateway to download and reupload the file. It just skips the client side bottleneck.
And last but not least Object Mount supports object locking. Well I guess it is technically more a notification system. Most applications already have a build in locking mechanism. The moment you open a file it puts a lock file in the same folder to inform other instances that they should open this file read only until the lock file gets released. An example for that would be good old office word or excel documents on a network drive. The moment that lock file gets created Object Mount will send a notification to other Object Mount instances and that enables the build in locking mechanism to work on cloud storage. It allows multiple people to work on the same files.
That are all the features I can pull out of my head right now. Let me know if I forgot something. Next week I can also lure in some of the Object Mount developers that can explain these details better than me.
None. It just mounts your cloud storage as a local drive. That is just a listing operation and not a download. The download traffic starts when you access files (depending on the file operation) or pin them.
The old pricing was $15 with 1x included egress. The new pricing is $7 and another $7 if you use 1x egress. Isn’t that even more attractive?
Do these features have an ON/OFF switch?
In case of video editing, for ex, if you see that it dosen’t work as you want, or is too expensive, can you turn the feature off to download a copy on local storage for local editing?
In video editing software, you work with proxies to streamline everything, leaving the original files in the cloud. There’s a tutorial on Adobe Premiere that shows how to use it. You work with proxies locally
Object Mount presents data as if it was a local filesystem. Sharing is a feature of another older tool: Object Browser: it can create a shareable link for you.