Object storage has the potential to provide IT departments with a great deal of value. It can save money in infrastructure costs by allowing the organization to use less-expensive hardware, it can reduce management time through the ease of scalability, as well as provide tremendous flexibility for certain types of storage needs.

But, as exciting as it sounds, object storage is not the answer to all your storage problems. Sometimes, block storage is a far better fit. There are use cases where object storage performs beautifully, scales out seamlessly, and solves all sorts of management headaches, but in other situations, it outright fails to meet the needs of your application.

You have to decide which type of architectural approach is appropriate for your needs, as you balance the requirements for a scalable storage solution that provides resilience and performance. The primary issues are eventual consistency or strong consistency. Object storage systems are eventually consistent while block storage systems are strongly consistent.

Eventual consistency can provide virtually unlimited scalability. It ensures the high availability of data that needs to be durably stored but is relatively static and will not change much, if at all. This is why storing photos, video, and other unstructured data is an ideal use case for object storage systems; it does not need to be constantly altered. The downside to eventual consistency is that there is no guarantee that a read request returns the most recent version of the data.

Strong consistency is needed for real-time systems such as transactional databases that are constantly being written to but provide limited scalability and reduced availability as a result of hardware failures. Scalability becomes even more difficult within a geographically distributed system. Strong consistency is a requirement, whenever a read request must return the most updated version of the data.