Introduction

CloudBD provides Linux software that lets you use your cloud object storage (AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, OpenStack Swift) as persistent block storage (CloudBD disks).

Features:

• Extremely Durable - 1 TiB disk life expectancy of 64,000 years
• High Throughput - Sustained throughputs of up to 2.5 GiB/s
• Low-cost - Less expensive per GiB than native cloud provider block storage
• Thinly Allocated - Billed by disk usage instead of by disk capacity further reducing your storage costs
• Secure - All data is kept within your own cloud environment's buckets or containers

AWS Quick Start

CloudBD All-In-One

AWS users can try out CloudBD disks in as little as 15 minutes of your time with the CloudBD All-In-One.

1. Sign up for a free CloudBD account at manage.cloudbd.io/signup
2. Upload your CloudBD credentials.json to AWS SSM Parameter Store
3. Create a CloudBD All-In-One stack using AWS CloudFormation.

See the AWS Quickstart Guide for a complete step-by-step walkthrough.

CloudFormation

CloudBD disks on AWS can be created and managed directly from your CloudFormation templates. A full CloudFormation setup guide is available on the AWS S3 Remote documentation page.

General Quickstart Guide

1. Setup a Storage Remote

   • AWS S3
   • Google Cloud Storage
   • Swift Object Storage

2. Install the Software

   Install the CloudBD disk driver and deploy your CloudBD credentials.json to your server.

3. Create a Disk - CloudBD CLI

   Use the CloudBD CLI to create a CloudBD disk on your storage remote.

4. Attach the Disk - cbdtab

   Configure the /etc/cloudbd/cbdtab file to attach a CloudBD disk to your server.

5. Create a Filesystem

   Create a filesystem on your disk with the recommended formatting options.

Terms

• Storage Remote

  A CloudBD disk repository on your cloud provider's object storage system that stores CloudBD disks. Depending on your cloud provider this may consist of objects in an AWS S3 bucket, a Google Cloud Storage bucket, or a collection of OpenStack Swift containers.

  A storage remote can store any number of CloudBD disks.

  A storage remote can be used by multiple servers for storing disks.

  Servers require a storage remote config file in their /etc/cloudbd/remotes.d/ directory in order to access the storage remote.

• CloudBD Disk

  A thinly allocated virtual disk created on a storage remote.

  All disk data is stored within its storage remote's buckets or containers.

  Attach to servers using the storage remote config file and the cbdtab file. See Attach/Detach Disks (cbdtab) for more info.

  Each CloudBD disk may only be attached to one server at a time. Attaching the disk to multiple servers simultaneously can corrupt the disk.

• Server

  A physical or virtual machine in your cloud environment.

• CloudBD CLI

  A command line utility program for creating, destroying, and listing CloudBD disks on storage remotes. See Disk Management (CLI) or run   cloudbd --help   from a server for usage instructions.

• CloudBD Driver

  A block device driver that uses the Network Block Device (nbd) and device-mapper (dm) kernel modules to attach CloudBD disks to the /dev/mapper/ directory.

• remotes.d

  A directory for holding storage remote config files (located at /etc/cloudbd/remotes.d). The CloudBD driver and CLI require a valid <remote>.conf file in this directory to communicate with the storage remote named <remote>.

• cbdtab

  A configuration file on each server (located at /etc/cloudbd/cbdtab) that defines which CloudBD disks attach to the server. See Attach/Detach Disks or run   man cbdtab   from a server for configuration instructions and samples.