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Cloud pricing term

What is Object storage?

Object storage keeps named objects with metadata inside buckets rather than presenting a mountable block device by default.

Also called: bucket storage, S3-compatible storage, blob storage, cloud object store.

The expensive mistake

Choosing it as a cheap database disk because its price per GB is lower. Object storage has different access semantics, and requests, retrieval, replication, and transfer can be separate meters.

Where it appears on your bill

Look for stored GB-month, request or operation classes, retrieval, replication, and data transfer as distinct lines.

Worked example

The dated example uses Railway object storage at $0.015/GB-month and leaves the total open until stored capacity is supplied. At 100 stored GB-month, storage is 100 x $0.015 = $1.50. That low storage number does not turn the bucket into an AWS EBS-style block device.

Example prices checked:

Primary sources