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About the IBM Cloud Object Storage S3 API

About the IBM Cloud Object Storage S3 API

The IBM Cloud® Object Storage API is a REST-based API for reading and writing objects.

It uses IBM Cloud® Identity and Access Management for authentication and authorization, and supports a subset of the S3 API for easy migration of applications to IBM Cloud.

This reference documentation is being continuously improved. If you have technical questions about using the API in your application, post them on StackOverflow. Add both ibm-cloud-platform and object-storage tags and help improve this documentation thanks to your feedback.

As Cloud Identity and Access Management 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 reference.

The following tables describe the complete set of operations of the IBM Cloud Object Storage API. For more information, see the API reference page for buckets or objects.

Bucket operations

These operations create, delete, get information about, and control behavior of buckets.

Table 1. Bucket operation
Bucket operation Note
GET Buckets Used to retrieve a list of all buckets that belong to an account.
DELETE Bucket Deletes an empty bucket.
DELETE Bucket CORS Deletes any CORS (cross-origin resource sharing) configuration set on a bucket.
GET Bucket Lists objects in a bucket. Limited to listing 1,000 objects at a time.
GET Bucket CORS Retrieves any CORS configuration set on a bucket.
HEAD Bucket Retrieves a bucket's headers.
GET Multipart Uploads Lists multipart uploads that aren't completed or canceled.
PUT Bucket Buckets have naming restrictions. Accounts are limited to 100 buckets.
PUT Bucket CORS Creates a CORS configuration for a bucket.

Object operations

These operations create, delete, get information about, and control behavior of objects.

Table 1. Object operation
Object operation Note
DELETE Object Deletes an object from a bucket.
DELETE Batch Deletes many objects from a bucket with one operation.
GET Object Retrieves an object from a bucket.
HEAD Object Retrieves an object's headers.
OPTIONS Object Checks CORS configuration to see whether a specific request can be sent.
PUT Object Adds an object to a bucket.
PUT Object (Copy) Creates a copy of an object.
Begin Multipart Upload Creates an upload ID for a set of parts to be uploaded.
Upload Part Uploads a part of an object that is associated with an upload ID.
Upload Part (Copy) Uploads a part of an existing object that is associated with an upload ID.
Complete Multipart Upload Assembles an object from parts that are associated with an upload ID.
Cancel Multipart Upload Cancels upload and deletes outstanding parts that are associated with an upload ID.
List Parts Returns a list of parts that are associated with an upload ID

More information about IBM Cloud Object Storage features and use-cases can be found at ibm.com.