OpenStack Summit October 2015 Tokyo

One of the unique features of an object store is the ability to associate user defined metadata attributes and values with containers and objects.

However, in order to leverage the full potential of valuable metadata, efficient metadata search is essential. Although this feature is currently missing in Swift, it is now gaining significant interest in the community. 

In this talk, we describe the components of design and implementation of a metadata search capability integrated with OpenStack Swift. This facility has a rich metadata search API, and enables key applications that were not previously feasible, such as bio-informatics applications and analysing a media repository. In the public transportation domain, we demonstrate a smart city IoT service which collects bus trip history for EMT Madrid and stores it in Swift, Geo-spatial and time series metadata search enables efficiently retrieving the data of interest - for example it supports queries such as retrieving the bus trip history for a certain bus line close to a major sporting event which took place last Saturday. This enables efficient analysis of the data, for example comparing it with data for the same event in previous years.