Openomy: Now with unlimited storage and even more control over your data (via your own S3 account)!

Today is another big day here at Openomy: You can now use your own Amazon S3 account within Openomy! This is important for many reasons: you now have unlimited storage (just pay Amazon for what you use), full control over where your files are stored, and the ability to manage your S3 account through the Openomy interface.

How It Works

An example: Every day, I back up some files to S3 using the S3Fox Firefox extension. I use my Openomy account for storing files, too.

All I have to do is set up my S3 account with Openomy and now I'll be able to upload and download even more files through Openomy -- the 1gb storage limit is removed when I use my own S3 account. Every file I upload will be stored in my own S3 account. My older Openomy files won't change and will be available just as they were before.

Syncing
Moreover, anything that I upload to my S3 account outside of Openomy can be imported into my Openomy account with a single click. For example, if I add a file through S3Fox, I can Sync my account, making it available via Openomy.

Likewise, if I delete a file from S3Fox, I can Sync and it will no longer be shown within Openomy.

Setup

To setup, just click the Your Account link at the top right of every page, and fill in your AWS credentials, including the bucket you'd like to use. That's it! All new files will be uploaded to that bucket.

If you'd like to Sync, just click the Sync button. Any differences between what Openomy knows about and S3 contains will be resolved. You may Sync your account at any time, but beware that Syncing may take a few minutes.

Caution!

This is a Beta feature, and we are making it publicly available for testing. We are using this feature internally already, and are confident in the quality. That said, you should be aware of a few things:

• Once you begin using S3, you can not stop. We plan on adding this ability shortly, but for now, there's no turning back.


• If you delete a file from Openomy that is stored in your S3 account, it is also deleted from S3. Make sure this is what you actually want!

Feedback

As always, we love to hear feedback about our features, so please do send me email. Comments, suggestions, bug reports, and flames are all welcome!

Announcing the Openomy API v2.0

I'm very pleased to announce that today we're formally launching our new API (v2.0)! This is a huge step forward for Openomy, the developers using Openomy to develop applications, and the users of Openomy and participating applications.

The new API is much more "REST-compliant" (as opposed to our older, GETSful API) and should be much easier for developers to write applications against. It will also be much easier for us at Openomy to add features. We think our developers will greatly enjoy this new simplicity and ability to quickly iterate on your apps!

S3 Storage

Also with this launch, we're formally announcing that our default
storage engine is now Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). In addition to cutting costs, we believe using S3 will bring more peace of mind to our users and developers that their files are safe and secure in Amazon's data centers and will be highly available.

Achieving Our Vision

Launching both the new API as well as our new storage system completes a long process of rearchitecting our backend to allow us to grow more easily and iterate more quickly. The short-term benefits of this are quicker responses and higher uptime. The long-term benefits are allowing us to focus more closely on our vision of becoming the Online File System.

Over the past couple of years, as we predicted, the world is moving to an almost entirely web-based software model. We post our photos to Flickr, write our documents on Zoho, etc. Unfortunately, it's much too difficult for us to use our photos posted on Flickr within our documents on Zoho.

This is solved in the traditional desktop-based software model by the file system. Any application can access any file via a single API in the file system. There are (virtually) no data silos on the desktop. Any file is available for use by any application.

We're working to achieve this on the web. Our goal is to break down the data silos and allow applications to have access to all of a user's data. Moreover, we want the user to have full control over this. You deserve to be able to choose what applications have access to which data and have full data portability.

We believe this is the right model, and with these latest launches, you'll start to see this happening shortly!

P.S. Don't worry! The old APIs will stay on for a while, and we'll cover the deprecation process at a later time in another post.