Simplifying the IBM Cloud Object Storage API for JavaScript with npm!
As many of you are already aware, IBM offers an incredibly unique and ultra-scalable Object Storage platform called IBM Cloud Object Storage (formerly known as Cleversafe), which can be consumed by enterprises and service providers in on-premise, hybrid, or public cloud formats. IBM Cloud Object Storage has been rated by both IDC and Gartner as a leader in the object storage space (if not THE leader) and upon our first-hand experiences with it from both dev and operations vantage points, it's easy to see why.
Again, here are the top general use cases for IBM Cloud Object Storage:
- Content Repository
- Enterprise Collaboration
- Archiving
- Backup
- Storage-as-a-Service
- Object Storage for digital applications
One of our first internal demo use cases our teams developed on top of IBM Cloud Object Storage was a Video Analytics Autotagging application that uses IBM Watson in order to "see" themes and items in a video, autotag the video with those themes/items, and store both the videos and its tags in Cloud Object Storage (for future retrieval purposes by analytics platforms). You can read more about the specifics of our demo app in this blog entry.
During the creation of our video app, we wrote a lightweight request wrapper in Node.js (exposed to users and other apps/services via API) that helped us more easily and efficiently access the IBM Cloud Object Storage API, including simplifying the process of accessing Cloud Object Storage via a proxy (if in a hybrid cloud scenario or similar situation). Here's a quick rundown of some of the advantages of using this wrapper for your app, if you're using IBM Cloud Object Storage for object storage:
- Simplifies the login and authentication procedure for the IBM Cloud Object Storage (Cleversafe) API
- Enables proxy support for IBM Cloud Object Storage instances behind firewalls
- Streamlines the insertion of objects into Cloud Object Storage vaults
- Lists vaults in an IBM Cloud Object Storage instance in JSON format
- Lists objects inside an IBM Cloud Object Storage vault in JSON format
- Streamlines the process of deleting of objects inside a Cloud Object Storage vault
- Streamlines the process of downloading objects from a Cloud Object Storage vault
If you're interested in using our IBM Cloud Object Storage request wrapper (open source), you can take a look on npm for more information (package named npm-cleversafe (naturally)), or directly on GitHub here.
As always, please feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions on this wrapper or IBM Cloud Object Storage itself!