Object Storage (Buckets & Keys)

Picture a self-storage facility with countless rooms, and every room has countless lockers. Each locker has a unique label taped to the front — not a folder path, just one long label like '2024/jan/sunset.png'. That's object storage. The room is a 'bucket,' a named container you create once. The label on each locker is its 'key,' a unique name; no two lockers in the same room share a label. What's inside the locker — the actual file, like a photo or a video — is the 'object.' Keys often look like folder paths with slashes in them, but there are no real subfolders here. It's genuinely one flat room of labeled lockers, and you can reach every locker directly by its label, without walking through any folders.

1. 1Create a bucket first. This is a named container that will hold your objects, like naming the storage room before you rent lockers in it.
2. 2Store something with 'put': give it a bucket, a unique key (the label), and the object itself. If that exact key already exists in that bucket, this overwrites it.
3. 3Fetch something with 'get': give the bucket and key. If a locker with that exact label exists, you get its contents back — a HIT. If not, you get nothing — a MISS. There's no partial match.
4. 4Browse what's in a bucket with 'list.' You can filter by prefix, meaning everything whose key starts with a given string. This is the closest thing to 'listing a folder,' even though it's really just a text match over flat labels.

Use this for storing files that don't need a database's structure — user-uploaded photos, video files, PDFs, backups, log archives. Anything from a few kilobytes to many gigabytes, that you mostly write once and read many times, is a natural fit for object storage instead of a regular database.

• ⚠Expecting real folders and subfolder operations, like renaming a 'folder.' A key with slashes in it is still just one flat string. Renaming a 'folder' means rewriting every key that starts with that prefix, one by one.
• ⚠Assuming 'get' does partial or fuzzy matching on the key. It's an exact match only — even one different character is a MISS, not a close hit.
• ⚠Reusing the same key for different content without meaning to. 'Put' silently overwrites, so a naming collision quietly destroys the previous object with no warning.