A Simple File Storage System for Web Applications

AOL Technologies has created a scalable object store for web applications. The goal of the object store was to eliminate the creation of a separate storage system for every application we produce while avoiding sending data to external storage services. AOL developers had been devoting a significant amount of time to creating backend storage systems to enable functionality in their applications. These storage systems were all very similar and many relied on difficult-to-scale technologies like network attached file systems. This paper describes our implementation and the operating experience with the storage system. The paper also presents a feature roadmap and our release of an open source version.