Cloudberry In On the S3 Ground Floor, Grows With S3 and the Cloud

by Richard on January 20, 2012

Guest post by Alexander Negrash, Marketing Manager, CloudBerry Lab

Alexander Negrash, Cloudberry Lab

“Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.” That is the definition of the Amazon S3 posted on the original S3 website. It was the same in 2008, when CloudBerry Lab was founded. Today, with the AWS console, tons of documentation and dozens if not hundreds of Amazon S3 related software apps, it is not as hard to use, and benefit from, S3 as it used to be in 2008. But back then S3 was only for developers. And that was the issue for us too, when we started to develop CloudBerry Explorer. The intention was to create a simple desktop client with file manager functionality to help store and manage files on S3.

As a result we came up with an FTP-like client in the best traditions of Norton Commander. At first the program was quite simple, but did its job well. The decision was to share it with the community and it was not about money. It was and still is free of charge. Cloudberry Explorer turned out to be “right thing at the right time”. The product grew over the time and we extended it with related AWS services such as CloudFront, IAM and AWS Import/ Export.

Back in 2008 there were no .NET SDK as it exists now and we had to start by developing a .NET wrapper over the Amazon S3 REST API. To get started we used an open source library but we have substantially extended it over the time.

Over the course of three years Amazon S3 grew as a platform with a lot of advanced features. We think that Multi-Part Upload functionality that helps reliably upload files up to 5TB has been the most significant enhancement. Before this functionality was introduced the maximum object size has been only 5Gb and in practice you most of the time you could only upload up to 300 MB.

Another important improvement is an ability to turn on bucket versioning. This feature helps you to create a version every time a file is modified and can protect you from accidental deletion. It lays the foundation for a simple document management system that you can design over S3 with a little effort.

Finally, Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) Service with the Policy based permission language makes it possible to grant individual users access to certain buckets and folders providing for easy content sharing.

We think in the future Amazon S3 along with other web services will continue setting the standards when it comes to cloud computing and keep their leadership position on the market.

When the AWS Console emerged we didn’t see users losing the interest in our product as it offers a desktop alternative to a pure web application and it adds value to the console with advanced features. We continued to stay ahead of the new developments and rapidly support new features provided by Amazon S3. Recently we have added support for Multi Object Delete and Object Expiration features.

It is also important to mention, that alongside with freeware version of CloudBerry Explorer, we launched a PRO version of CloudBerry Explorer. The PRO edition was designed to deliver additional functionality such as encryption, compression and IAM management, to advanced AWS users.

As the cloud storage market grows we are extending the range of cloud storage vendors we support. With the recent addition of OpenStack and Rackspace Cloud Files, we are now supporting over a dozen cloud storage vendors that also include Microsoft Azure, Google Storage and Nirvanix to name a few.

We also have an online backup tool in our product portfolio. It comes with a solid set of features such as real-time backup and block level updates and helps automated data backup to Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and other cloud storage. CloudBerry Backup, allows having a full control over the backup process and backup destination (cloud storage) independently from each other. The users should sign up for cloud storage independently and CloudBerry Lab doesn’t have access to their data. Combination of a standalone program and public cloud storage provides the true security to our customers who we believe are small and mid-sized businesses and IT-service companies in particular, though individuals can also use the product.

Tagged as: Amazon S3, AWS, CloudBerry Lab, CloudFront, Google Storage, Microsoft Azure, Norton Commander, OpenStack