Swift is the object storage management component. Object storage is a simple content-only storage system. Files are stored without the metadata that a block filesystem has. These are simply containers and files. The files are simply content. Swift has two layers as part of its deployment: the proxy and the storage engine. The proxy is the API layer. It's the service that the end user communicates with. The proxy is configured to talk to the storage engine on the user's behalf. By default, the storage engine is the Swift storage engine. It's able to do software-based storage distribution and replication. GlusterFS and Ceph are also popular storage backends for Swift. They have similar distribution and replication capabilities to those of Swift storage.

In Chapter 8, Object Storage, we'll work with object content and the configuration involved in setting up an alternative storage backend for Swift.