# Object Storage service overview

The OpenStack Object Storage is a multi-tenant object storage system. It is highly scalable and can manage large amounts of unstructured data at low cost through a RESTful HTTP API.

It includes the following components:

Proxy servers (swift-proxy-server)

  Accepts OpenStack Object Storage API and raw HTTP requests to upload files, modify metadata, and create containers. It also serves file or container listings to web browsers. To improve performance, the proxy server can use an optional cache that is usually deployed with memcache.

Account servers (swift-account-server)

  Manages accounts defined with Object Storage.

Container servers (swift-container-server)

  Manages the mapping of containers or folders, within Object Storage.

Object servers (swift-object-server)

  Manages actual objects, such as files, on the storage nodes.

Various periodic processes

  Performs housekeeping tasks on the large data store. The replication services ensure consistency and availability through the cluster. Other periodic processes include auditors, updaters, and reapers.

WSGI middleware

  Handles authentication and is usually OpenStack Identity.

swift client

  Enables users to submit commands to the REST API through a command-line client authorized as either a admin user, reseller user, or swift user.

swift-init

  Script that initializes the building of the ring file, takes daemon names as parameter and offers commands. Documented in https://docs.openstack.org/swift/latest/admin_guide.html#managing-services.

swift-recon

  A cli tool used to retrieve various metrics and telemetry information about a cluster that has been collected by the swift-recon middleware.

swift-ring-builder

  Storage ring build and rebalance utility. Documented in https://docs.openstack.org/swift/latest/admin_guide.html#managing-the-rings.

this page last updated: 2025-11-03 12:55:44

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