Storing assets for web projects in S3-compatible buckets improves the scalability of web-based apps dramatically compared to conventional storage. Linode/Akamai provides an easy-to-use solution dubbed "object storage."

In this article, I will provide a simple, quick-start guide on how to use the service while keeping risk at a minimum.

Because Linodes Object Storage service is S3 compatible, you can use their terminal to s3cmd. This python based tool can be installed through the pip with this command:

Once s3cmd is installed you must create an access key in the Linode/Akamai that can be used to manage all your object storage buckets.

Navigate into the "Object Storage" section, click on the "Access Keys" tab, and then on the "Create Access Key" button

Then, create an Access Key without Limited Access. This allows the key to do anything related to permissions and enables it to do anything with all your buckets. In essence, it works like the root account on Linux systems.

Note down the Key and secret in a safe place.

Now, you have done everything you need to do before you can start using s3cli for all your configuration and management needs on your Linode/Akamai S3 buckets.

Now it's time to configure the s3cli on your local host to manage your buckets.

Run this command to start the interactive configurator:

The configuration wizard is pretty intuitive, but you must set:

• Default Region: US
• S3 Endpoint <datacenter-id>.linodeobjects.com
• DNS-style: %(bucket)s.<datacenter-id>.linodeobjects.com

The "datacenter-id" can be found here in the Akamai documentation.

NB! The configuration wizard cannot verify the credentials, so you must enter "n" on the Retry configuration prompt.

Now, you can finally start using s3cli.

Creating a S3 bucket is pretty straightforward. The only thing to consider is that you don't have your namespace on the data center. Your bucket must have a globally unique name in that data center.

To create a bucket, run this command:

By default, the S3 bucket permits nobody to access the files uploaded. This is very good for confidentiality and integrity but not for availability. To make the S3 bucket available to us and our application users, we must make the uploaded files available to web users.

Because we don't want anybody to be able to enumerate the uploaded files, we only want the users to access the specific files they request. Based on this, we will create a policy to only view requested objects.

Create the following JSON file:

The version cannot be changed since this references the policy standard version, not the date the policy was created or edited.

To apply the new policy, run this command:

If the application needs to upload files to your bucket, you should add a new S3 Access Key with write permissions to that specific bucket.