Alibaba Cloud Storage Gateway vs ObjectiveFS

Alibaba Cloud Storage Gateway connects on-premises or cloud applications to Alibaba Cloud OSS buckets through standard file and block protocols, without application changes. File gateways provide NFS or SMB access, while iSCSI gateways provide block access. Frequently used file data can be cached locally while OSS supplies storage capacity. Gateways run in a data center or on Alibaba Cloud, including ECS instances, with VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, VHD, Qcow2, and Raw deployment options. Management is available through a web console or API. Resource Access Management grants specific permissions without sharing AccessKey pairs. Data transferred to OSS is encrypted, and customer-managed-key server-side encryption is available. MD5 checks consistency; logs and monitoring metrics record gateway activity. File gateways support POSIX and third-party backup software. Use cases include extending local storage, backup and sharing, cross-data-center access, and disaster recovery. There is no free plan.

ObjectiveFS is a shared distributed POSIX file system for persistent storage across cloud instances, laptops, containers, and office servers. It runs on Linux and macOS and can be self-hosted. The software runs on customer machines and connects directly to object stores through the S3 API, without storage clusters or metadata servers. Multiple machines can read and write the same filesystem, with updates visible across them. Supported targets include Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, IBM Cloud Object Storage, Oracle Cloud, DigitalOcean Spaces, Scaleway, Wasabi, Ceph, MinIO, NetApp StorageGRID, Hitachi Content Platform, and S3-compatible stores. Data is encrypted locally with a customer-known key and remains encrypted in transit and at rest; checksums verify integrity. Automatic and checkpoint snapshots can be mounted read-only. Personal costs $99 a month and includes 3 instances, up to 50 instances, 5TB storage, and unlimited filesystems. A 14-day trial is available, but there is no free plan. Object-store charges are billed separately. ObjectiveFS does not run natively on Windows, though a Linux machine can export it through NFS or Samba.