How to access object storage containers from Destination Earth

Destination Earth cloud offers the possibility of creating object storage containers in which you can store your data.

In object storage terminology, a container or bucket can be considered a counterpart of a drive connected to your computer. Keeping within that analogy, an object would be a file stored on your computer and its file location and name in S3 system would be known as a key.

This article gives overview and orientation which method of accessing object containers to use. For each method, a link to a more technical article is provided.

What We Are Going To Cover

Accessing object storage from Destination Earth cloud with:

  • Horizon dashboard

  • OpenStack CLI Client (Swift)

  • Linux (s3fs and s3cmd)

  • Windows (Rclone)

  • Python (boto3)

Prerequisites

No. 1 Hosting

You need a Destination Earth hosting account with access to the Horizon interface. Depending on the cloud you want to use, the link for the account would be:

Horizon dashboard

If you do not want to install any software on your computer, you can

  • access Horizon dashboard through an Internet browser and

  • use Horizon commands to access the object storage containers.

Learn more here:

How to use Object Storage

OpenStack CLI Client (Swift)

To access object storage from Destination Earth via the OpenStack CLI client, you can use additional OpenStack module called Swift. More information can be found here:

How to share private container from object storage to another user

Linux

This section covers two Linux programs which can be used to access object storage containers.

s3fs

s3fs uses FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) to mount object storage containers in a local file system.

Check this article:

How to Mount Object Storage Container as a File System in Linux Using s3fs

s3cmd

You can use s3cmd to access object storage on Linux without mounting it as a file system.

More information here:

How to access private object storage using S3cmd or boto3

Windows

On Windows, you can access object storage containers using Rclone. Learn more here:

How to mount object storage container from Destination Earth as file system on local Windows computer

Python

If you need to access object storage containers using Python (on platforms such as Windows, Linux, macOS or JupyterLab), you can use boto3 library:

How to access private object storage using S3cmd or boto3

What To Do Next

If you want to share your buckets with others and be able to use rules which control who can access them, check: Bucket sharing using s3 bucket policy