Open Stack

Hello,

This question is not directly related to the OpenStack Object Store, but 
it would be interesting to hear your opinions on that.

Imagine multi-cloud environment with multiple heterogeneous object 
stores (e.g. OpenStack, AWS S3, Azure blob store, etc.). And the 
question is: How to identify blob resource uniquely across multiple 
object stores?

The first thing which comes to mind is URI. But URI does not work for me 
for two reasons (and I believe for the same reasons it won't work for 
others):

 1. URI of the resource does not contain all information which is
    necessary to access resource. For instance, in OpenStack
    authentication information needs to be stored and processed separately.
 2. Each object store provider has its own URI format. Some include API
    version, context, etc. in the URI. This will require application to
    interpret each URI differently based on the provider type. But
    provider information is not in URI. Again, needs to be stored
    somewhere separately.
 3.  From application point of view, URI should remain the same even if
    object store access information like credentials, API version, IP,
    port, etc. changes. Imagine situation when you have thousands URIs
    of OpenStack objects stored in database. After another client and
    server upgrade you will need to update URIs with new API version.
    Not good.

So, has anyone else came across this problem and what would be 
recommended solution?

Many thanks,
Rustam.
<http://www.linkedin.com/in/aliyev>
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