In the past we have written about Amazon S3 and how, aas the 100 pound gorilla, of the Cloud Storage world, it’s S3 API has become almost a de facto interface for developers. This is one of the reasons that we originally added an S3 API protocol adaptor to our service.
Many start up’s, small businesses and even enterprises choose initially to use S3 for storage. This can be fine initially, however, when the volume increases the monthly bill can become an OPEX issue and small companies (and Enterprise) are looking for ways to slash their costs in any way they can. Aside from this other companies have stringent issues about where data is stored (for clarification, Amazon S3 is PCI DSS 2.0 compliant, SAS 70 Type II certified, and VPV ISO 27001 certified) or wish to store it within their own data centre or site.
As SMEStorage supports over 35 Clouds and SaaS services, you could very easily turn Google Docs, Box, Windows Azure or DropBox into an S3 Platform, or you could just add your own NetGear or PogoPlug appliance, or other private storage implementation.
The SME hosted service, and Cloud Appliance, provides the ability access to any Saas or cloud storage mapped to your account via multiple protocols. These include FTP, WebDav and also S3. These work even if the backend provider does not support the protocol natively. The SME protocol adaptors will do the protocol translation to the native storage provider protocol. One of the benefits of this that the users don’t need any special software to be able to access the Clouds. They can use any FTP, or WebDav client, or in the case of S3 any S3 client or code in which the host endpoint can be changed.
To demonstrate compatibility with the S3 API and tools we will now look at how to use AWS s3curl with a smestorage account.
To use s3 curl you will need to modify s3curl.pl and change the end point to
‘s3.smetorage.com’ (US Server) or ‘s3eu.storagemadeeasy.com‘ (EU Server) e.g my @endpoints = ( ‘s3.storagemadeeasy.com‘);
Your id is your smestorage account user name and you can obtain your secret key by logging into SMEStorage.com going to “My Dashboard” (from the sidebar) and copying the API key from the“Tech Info” section where the “API secret Key” resides.
Now you are all set to use s3curl. For example to list all the buckets you can use
./s3curl.pl –id smestorageusername –key API secret key http://s3.storagemadeeasy.com
For s3curl command line options please see the README file that is part of the s3curl package. Also note that the secure way to use s3curl is to use the .s3curl file in your home directory to pass the id and and key.
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