Spaces Object Storage is an S3-compatible object storage service. Spaces buckets let you store and serve large amounts of data, and the built-in CDN minimizes page load times and improves performance.
DigitalOcean Spaces provide S3-compatible object storage which lets you store and serve large amounts of data. You can create them in a few seconds and use them immediately with no configuration. Data transfer is automatically secured with HTTPS, and the available storage capacity scales seamlessly.
Spaces buckets are ideal for storing static, unstructured data like audio, video, and images as well as large amounts of text. Because buckets are an object storage implementation, use cases like databases, applications written in server-side languages, and mission-critical applications will work best with local storage or block storage.
If you use Spaces to serve static or dynamic content for your website, you can also benefit from using the Spaces CDN (Content Delivery Network), which is available at no additional cost. CDNs reduce page load times, improve performance, and reduce your bandwidth and infrastructure costs by caching your assets across a set of geographically distributed servers.
A Spaces subscription gives you the ability to create multiple buckets to use as logical units for segmenting content. Each bucket has its own unique URL.
The Spaces URL naming pattern is spacename.region.digitaloceanspaces.com and region.digitaloceanspaces.com/spacename, where spacename is the name of your Space and region is the region your Space is in.
Spaces is built with Ceph, like block storage. As we describe in our blog post on why we chose Ceph:
Ceph is built for redundancy, and we carefully ensure that the loss of a single drive, server, or even an entire datacenter rack does not compromise data integrity or availability.
Ceph gracefully heals itself when individual components fail, ensuring continuity of service with uncompromised data protection. Additionally, we use sophisticated monitoring systems built around tools including Icinga, Prometheus, and our own open-source
ceph_exporter. These help us respond immediately to any issues with our Ceph infrastructure to ensure continuous availability.
Ceph is also compatible with a large subset of the S3 RESTful API, which allows you to use many familiar tools and commands.
Spaces Object Storage provides a built-in CDN that you can enable with a few clicks. If you’ve enabled the Spaces CDN for your bucket, you can access the contents of your bucket using the edge URL <spacename>.<region>.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com instead of the origin URL.
A CDN is a network of edge servers that deliver content to users. Each point of presence (PoP), the location of a group of edge servers, sends content to the users that are physically closest to it.
CDNs help deliver static and dynamic online content faster and more reliably. Because most search engines factor page load time into their algorithm, using a CDN can also provide an SEO advantage. Using a CDN additionally provides a layer of redundancy for websites; a CDN PoP can serve cached content to users even if the origin or other PoPs are down.
You can control how long your CDN content is cached using the TTL settings, either for all the content in your bucket or for individual objects. You can similarly choose to purge the cache for the entire bucket or individual objects at any time. Each request with a unique URL, including the query string, is treated as a unique asset and has its own cache.
If you don’t want to use the default edge URL, you can use a custom subdomain, like images.example.com. Subdomains you use with the Spaces CDN must have an SSL certificate for security reasons. If you’ve added your domain to DigitalOcean, you use DigitalOcean’s Let’s Encrypt certificates, which are fully managed and renewed on your behalf every 60 days. You also have the option to manually upload an SSL certificate if you use a different DNS provider or want to upload an existing certificate.