What is meant by object storage?

Question

Data storage

Often I meet the term of a certain object in the terminology of the same S3. I just can not understand what is meant by it and why "it's cool." What is the fundamental difference from a file available via FTP?
As I understand it, this is the same FTP file only replicated to several nodes and available via http right?

Answer 1

Not really. The file system is hierarchical, and the metadata structure that describes a file is pretty rigid. Therefore, filesystems don't scale well.
An object in object storage is a file plus some set of metadata. The storage structure in object storage is flat (that is, there is no hierarchy at the storage level, unlike the file system). An object is a file plus its metadata. The metadata set can be changed. Based on metadata, you can search, index, etc., which speeds up the extraction of objects.
Interface for interaction with object storages - yes, requests via HTTP/HTTPS. From the point of view of applications, this is much more convenient than parsing the file system or working with its driver.