不是一个文件系统
a long-term storage system for a more permanent type of static data that can be retrieved, leveraged, and then updated if necessary
virtual machine images, photo storage, email storage and backup archiving
distributed architecture
这个跟HDFS很像
The core storage system is designed to provide a safe, secure,
automatically re-sizing and network accessible way to store data
这个东西的随机读写的性能？
与HDFS的区别
1. HDFS uses a central system to maintain file metadata (Namenode), where as in Swift the metadata is distributed and replicated across the cluster. Having a central meta-data system is a single point of failure for HDFS, and makes it more difficult to scale to very large sizes.
2. Swift is designed with multi-tenancy in mind, where HDFS has no notion of multi-tenancy
3. HDFS is optimized for larger files (as is typical for processing data), where Swift is designed to store any sized files.
Files in HDFS are write once, and can only have one writer at a time, in Swift files can be written many times, and under concurrency, the last write wins.
HDFS is written in Java, where Swift is written in Python