Object storage: what it does in a system design

Home › Reference › Components › Object storage

Object storage

Durable storage for files of any size. Nothing to size and no bandwidth limit, but every request takes tens of milliseconds and is billed.

Read latency: Time each read (GET) takes. Object stores are slow per request, tens of milliseconds by default. Pick a shape: constant, lognormal, exponential or uniform. Higher slows every read.
Write latency: Time each write (PUT) takes, usually longer than a read. Pick a shape: constant, lognormal, exponential or uniform. Higher slows every upload but nothing is rejected for load.
Preloaded keys: How many objects already exist at the start of the run, so early reads find data. If left empty, the load profile's dataset size is used. Raising it avoids reads of missing objects.
Crashes: Scheduled outages of the store. While it is down, requests to it fail, and requests already in progress fail too.