Scality Connect ports S3 apps to Azure Blob storage

Object storage vendor Scality is moving to connect Amazon S3 apps to Microsoft Azure Blob storage in multicloud setups.

Scality Connect software, which launched last week, can help customers overcome the hurdle of porting an application based on the Simple Storage Service (S3) API to Azure Blob storage.

Scality plans to announce in December advanced Amazon S3 API support, along with versioning and a bucket website, said Wally MacDermid, vice president of business development for cloud at Scality, based in San Francisco.

John Webster, a senior partner at Evaluator Group in Boulder, Colo., said the multicloud play will be of particular interest to the DevOps groups within organizations. Many developers spend a great deal of time doing API modifications to applications.

"Anytime you can relieve the user of that burden is good. [Lack of interoperability] is a big issue. This is the last thing customers want," Webster said of the need to modify APIs. "They just hate it. They have to modify APIs to work with other APIs."

MacDermid said there is no hardware requirement for Scality Connect.  It is included as a stateless container inside an Azure subscription. Connect stores data in the Microsoft Azure Blob storage native format, and the container runs in a virtual machine within the customer's subscription.

"We don't hold any data. We just pass it to the Azure cloud," MacDermid said. "An application that works on S3 can run in Azure without requiring any modification in the code.

"Once the data is up in Azure, you can use the Azure management services on top of it."

Scality Connect makes it easier for developers to deploy applications within Microsoft Azure and use its advanced services. The software is available through the Azure Marketplace.

The Microsoft Azure and Google clouds do not support the Amazon S3 API, which has become the de facto cloud standard in the industry. That means the Azure Blob storage does not talk to the Amazon S3 API, which limits a customer's ability to use multiple clouds.

"One side talks S3, and the other side talks the Azure API, and neither talks to each other," MacDermid said. "This is a problem not only for customers, but for Azure, as well. [Microsoft] would admit that. The Scality Connect runs in the Azure Cloud. It gets your data up to the Azure Cloud and allows you to use the Azure services. We are the translation layer."

Scality Connect is not the vendor's first multicloud initiative. Scality in July unveiled its Zenko open source software controller for multicloud management to store data and applications under a single user interface no matter where they reside, including Scality Ring. It helps customers match specific workloads to the best cloud service. Zenko is based on the Scality S3 Server.