Swarm provides a hierarchy of container objects: cluster, domain, and bucket (shown in white, below) to facilitate organizing storage of data objects.

Clusters

The cluster is the top-level container in an object storage cloud. A cluster can have several storage domains, each organized with a separate bucket:

These storage domains and buckets can enforce many business requirements:

Assign permissions
Issue metadata search or listing requests
Account for usage and billing

Configure a cluster in to a storage cloud (such as cloud.com, below) that allows users in one storage domain (my.cloud.com) securely access content separately from other users:

Domains

A domain is the highest-level container in which data objects are placed, and it is the primary way to control access to and grouping of the data.

A cluster administrator creates the domain either using the Swarm Admin Console or programmatically, with an SCSP command. Buckets and data objects must be created in a domain (tenanted), so plan to create domains first.

Best practices

These actions make URLs and cURL commands as simple as possible:

Have DNS map the cluster name to one or more of the Swarm nodes.
Create a storage domain that matches the name of the cluster. This is the default domain if no domain is specified in the SCSP request or if the specified domain does not exist.

See the Naming Rules.

Buckets

Buckets are the required organizing containers for any named objects in a domain. Buckets allows creating logical paths to named objects, and they provide a layer of access control.

Each bucket operates as a subdirectory in the domain:

MYDOMAIN/my_bucket/my_document.doc

Note

Buckets are not folders: they cannot be nested in other buckets.

The bucket must be created prior to storing a named object since named objects exist within buckets.

Important

Never write named objects without specifying a bucket (with a path like http://cluster.example.com/testfile.txt): doing so creates the object as a bucket. Buckets are treated differently, and they are not meant to contain a content body.

The cluster synchronously creates two replicas of the bucket object and then asynchronously creates any additional replicas as determined by a lifepoint header or the scsp.defaultContextReplicas and scsp.maxContextReplicas configuration parameters when creating a new bucket.