We said we could combine gateway and http proxy services within the object storage for the site specific http addresses of objects. The gateway also acts as a http proxy. Any implementation of gateway has to maintain a registry of destination addresses. As http access enabled objects proliferate with their geo-replications, this registry becomes granular at the object level while enabling rules to determine the site from which they need to be accessed. Finally they gather statistics in terms of access and metrics which come very useful for understanding the http accesses of specific content within the object storage. 

Both the above functionalities can be elaborate allowing gateway service to provide immense benefit per deployment.

The advantages of an http proxy include aggregations of usages. In terms of success and failure, there can be detailed count of calls. Moreover, the proxy could include all the features of a conventional http service like Mashery such as Client based caller information, destination-based statistics, per object statistics, categorization by cause and many other features along with a RESTful api service for the features gathered.