For developers

The powerful features of IBM Cloud® Object Storage are available to a developer directly from the command line.

First, ensure that you have the IBM Cloud® Platform CLI and IBM Developer Tools installed.

Create an instance of IBM Cloud Object Storage

First, make sure that you have an API key. Get it from IBM Cloud Identity and Access Management.
Log in to IBM Cloud Platform by using the CLI. It's also possible to store the API key in a file or set it as an environment variable.
```
ibmcloud login --apikey <value>
```
Next, create an instance of IBM Cloud Object Storage specifying the name for the instance and the Standard plan (see Choosing a plan and creating an instance). Now you have a CRN for the instance.
```
ibmcloud resource service-instance-create <instance-name> cloud-object-storage <plan> global
```

When trying to create a new instance, if you encounter the error No resource group targeted, it indicates that the default resource group is not available and that a resource group must be explicitly set. A list of available resource groups can be found using ibmcloud resource groups and the target can be set with ibmcloud target -g <resource-group>.

The Getting Started guide walks through the basic steps of creating buckets and objects, as well as inviting users and creating policies. A list of basic 'curl' commands can be found here.

Learn more about using the IBM Cloud CLI to create applications, manage Kubernetes clusters, and more in the documentation.

Using the API

For managing data stored in Object Storage, you can use S3 API compatible tools like the AWS CLI with HMAC credentials for compatibility. As IAM tokens are relatively easy to work with, curl is a good choice for basic testing and interaction with your storage. More information can be found in the curl and the API documentation.

Using libraries and SDKs

IBM COS SDKs are available for Python, Java, Go, and Node.js. These libraries are forked and modified versions of the AWS S3 SDKs that support IAM token-based authentication, as well as support for Key Protect.

Building applications on IBM Cloud

IBM Cloud® provides flexibility to developers in choosing the right architectural and deployment options for a given application. Run your code on bare metal, in virtual machines, in containers, or by using a serverless framework.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation fostered Kubernetes container orchestration framework, which forms the foundation for the IBM Cloud® Kubernetes Service. Developers who want to use Object Storage for persistent storage in their Kubernetes applications can learn more at the following links: