We were discussing gateway like functionality from object storage. While a gateway maintains address mapping for several servers where routes translate to physical destination based on say regex, here we give the ability to each object to records its virtual canonical address along with its physical location so that each object and its geographically replicated copies may be addressed specifically.  When an object is accessed by its address, the gateway used to forward the request to the concerned site based on a set of static rules say at the web server and usually based on regex. Instead with the gateway functionality now merged into the object storage, there are a few advantages that come our way: 

First, the address mapping is not at site level. It is at object level.  

Second, the address of the object – both universal as well as site specific are maintained along with the object as part of its location information 

Third, instead of internalizing a table of rules from the external gateway, a lookup service can translate universal object address to the address of the nearest object. This service is part of the object storage as a read only query. Since object name and address is already an existing functionality, we only add the ability to translate universal address to site specific address at the object level.  

Fourth, the gateway functionality exists as a microservice.  It can do more than static lookup of physical location of an object given a universal address instead of the site-specific address. It has the ability to generate tiny urls for the objects based on hashing.  This adds aliases to the address as opposed to the conventional domain-based address.  The hashing is at the object level and since we can store billions of objects in the object storage, a url shortening feature is a significant offering from the gateway service within the object storage. It has the potential to morph into other services than a mere translator of object addresses. Design of a url hashing service was covered earlier as follows. 

Fifth, the conventional gateway functionality of load balancing can also be handled with an elastic scale-out of just the gateway service within the object storage.  

Sixth, this gateway can also improve access to the object by making more copies of the object elsewhere and adding the superfluous mapping for the duration of the traffic. It need not even interpret the originating ip addresses to determine the volume as long as it can keep track of the number of read requests against existing address of the same object.  

These advantages can improve the usability of the objects and their copies by providing as many as needed along with a scalable service that can translate incoming universal address of objects to site specific location information.