Item | OSS | Self-managed storage solution |
Ease of use | Provides a variety of data management options. These options include standard RESTful APIs, SDKs for various programming languages, client tools, and a web-based console. You can upload, download, retrieve, and manage large amounts of data used for websites and mobile apps in the same way you use regular file systems. Provides unlimited bucket capacity. You can expand bucket capacity based on your business requirements. You no longer have to plan for storage capacity in order to store more files. Supports streaming read and write operations. This feature is suitable for scenarios where you want to store large files such as videos and require synchronous reads and writes. Supports the lifecycle management of data. You can configure lifecycle rules to delete expired objects or convert the storage classes of objects to more cost-effective storage classes, such as Infrequent Access (IA), Archive, Cold Archive, and Deep Cold Archive.
| Requires you to manually expand your storage capacity when the amount of data grows. Does not support streaming writes and reads. Does not support automatic data deletion based on lifecycle rules.
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Durability | OSS is part of the core infrastructure used within Alibaba Group. The high availability and reliability of OSS have been tested and proved by its excellent support for performance-demanding Double 11 events. OSS is built with high redundancy in mind, and coupled with a highly available architecture. These features eliminate single points of failure (SPOFs) and provide reliable data storage, ensuring the continuity of your business even under harsh circumstances. Provides up to 99.995% data availability. Provides up to 99.9999999999% (12 nines) data durability. Automatically expands bucket capacity to store your ever-growing data without causing business interruptions. Calculates the checksum of transferred packets to ensure data integrity during data transfer. Provides strong consistency for operations on objects. For example, an object can be accessed immediately and have redundant replicas on different facilities after it is uploaded or copied to a bucket. Stores multiple replicas of each object on multiple physical devices located in different facilities within the same region for better data reliability and availability. OSS regularly performs checks on replicas and recovers damaged data to ensure data durability and availability. OSS periodically verifies the integrity of data to detect data corruption caused by factors such as hardware failures. If data is partially corrupted or lost, OSS reconstructs and recovers the data based on the replicas.
| Remains prone to data losses from hardware failures. If a disk has a bad sector, data stored on the disk may be permanently lost. Requires manual data restoration, which is complex, time-consuming, and labor-intensive.
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Data security | Provides enterprise-grade, multi-level security. OSS provides a suite of data security features, including server-side encryption, client-side encryption, hotlink protection, bucket policies that specify IP address blacklists and whitelists, fine-grained access control, authentication and authorization based on temporary access credentials and signed URLs, log auditing, and the Write Once Read Many (WORM) strategy. Isolates resources by user and supports cross-cluster data synchronization and geo-disaster recovery. Allows you to configure SSL/TLS encryption to protect data in the cloud. Provides the versioning feature to protect objects against unintended operations. Complies with the data security and compliance regulations of multiple organizations, including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc. (FINRA).
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Cost | Provides abundant bandwidth and free inbound traffic. OSS supports connections to backbone networks through multi-homed Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Requires no O&M and hosting costs on the user side.
| Requires you to manually expand your storage capacity when the amount of data grows. Offers limited bandwidth due to slow single-line or double-line access to backbone networks. You need to manually expand bandwidth capacity during peak hours. Requires dedicated O&M personnel, which adds to costs.
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Intelligent storage | Provides a variety of data processing capabilities, such as Image Processing (IMG), video snapshot, document preview, image scenario recognition, and SQL query. OSS can be seamlessly integrated with the Hadoop ecosystem and Alibaba Cloud services such as Function Compute, E-MapReduce (EMR), Data Lake Analytics (DLA), Batch Compute, MaxCompute, and Database Backup (DBS) to manage and analyze your data. | Requires data processing capabilities that must be separately purchased and deployed. |
Access acceleration | Provides the transfer acceleration feature, which uses optimal route selection and protocol stack tuning to reduce timeouts in long-distance data transfers and improve user experience. For more information, see Enable transfer acceleration. Supports accelerated content delivery. OSS can be used as an origin server and used with Alibaba Cloud CDN to accelerate access to data.
| Does not support access acceleration. |