Storage
Object Storage
Storage for unstructured files accessed over HTTP, priced per gigabyte and built to hold anything from backups to media at massive scale.
Object storage keeps files as objects in a flat namespace, each retrieved over HTTP by a unique key. There's no filesystem hierarchy and no server to attach it to. It scales to billions of objects without breaking a sweat, which makes it the default home for backups, images, video, static assets, and data lakes. Amazon's S3 defined the category and its API became the de facto standard.
This is a category where the price spread is wild. The hyperscalers charge for storage and then again for egress every time you read data out. Backblaze B2 and Wasabi built their businesses on undercutting that: Backblaze runs around $5 per terabyte per month, Wasabi around $8 with no egress fee at all. For backup-heavy or read-heavy workloads, the savings are large.
The trade-off versus block storage is access pattern. Objects are great for whole-file reads and writes over the network, poor for the random, low-latency access a database needs. Match the tool to how the data is actually touched.
Go deeper
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