Friday, August 31, 2018

The gateway as a classifier.
The rules of a gateway need not mere regex translation of incoming address to another site-specific address. We are dealing with objects an all part of the object endpoint address such as the hierarchical namespace – bucket – object may be translated to another all-together different address but pointing to the same copy of the object. For that matter hashes of web addresses may be translated so that the caller may only need a tiny url to access an object and internally the same copy of the object may be provided at lightning speed from site specific buckets. We are not just putting the gateway on steroids, we are also making it smarter by allowing the user to customize the rules. These rules can be authored in the form of expressions and statements much like a program with lots of if then conditions ordered by their execution sequence. The gateway works more than an http proxy or a message queue server. It is a lookup of objects without sacrificing performance and without restrictions to the organization of objects within or distributed stores. It works much like routers and although we have referred to gateway as a networking layer over storage, it provides a query execution service as well.  All the queries are similar in their nature. They are mostly web addresses of objects. The storage server only knows about three internal copies of an object for durability. These copies share the same address and different objects have different web address. What a storage server may think as different objects may even be the same object for the user. How the user organizes the objects in namespaces and buckets may be based on her rules that are beyond the site replication. if the gateway can route the request to the same object to different sites, there is nothing preventing the gateway to let the user add custom rules that utilize this address translation for purposes other than geography based content distribution. Fundamentally, a specific address just for an object each does not benefit the customer when she wants to hand out the same address for content that are served by two or more same objects. Where those objects are located and how the address translation works may be based on statics site based routing via regex or dynamic routing based on rules and program.  Moreover, the gateway has the ability to interpret aliases of addresses that the object storage cannot. 

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