Before you use COS, it is recommended that you read COS Basic Concepts to learn some basic concepts required for using COS, such as the definitions of bucket, object, region, and access endpoint.
COS mainly offers the following features:
| Feature Category | Feature Overview |
|---|---|
| Operation | - Bucket operations Support creating, querying, deleting, and emptying buckets. - Object operations - Multiple storage types: According to different access frequencies and disaster recovery levels, COS offers multiple object storage types, including STANDARD and STANDARD_IA. - Objects/folders: Support operations such as uploading, querying, downloading, replicating, and deleting. |
| Data Management | - Lifecycle COS allows you to set rules for objects to perform automatic deletion on a specific object after a certain period of time (in days). - Static website Configure a bucket to host a static website and access the static website via the bucket's domain name. - Inventory COS allows you to configure an inventory task to regularly (daily or weekly) scan your bucket for specified objects or objects with the same prefix. Each task will output an inventory report, which is stored in the specified bucket as a CSV file. - Bucket tag A bucket tag can be used as an identifier for bucket management, so you can group together and manage buckets easily. You can set, query, and delete tags for a specified bucket. - Log management The log management feature is used to log the access details of a specified source bucket and store these details as log files in a specified bucket for better bucket management. - Event management The event notification feature enables prompt notification for user-concerned resource operations within the bucket. - Object tag The object tagging feature is used to help you group and manage objects in your bucket by adding a key-value pair as an object tag. An object tag consists of a "tagKey", an equal sign "=", and a "tagValue", for example, "group = IT". You can set, query, and delete tags for a specified object. |
| Cross-region disaster recovery | - Versioning Versioning is used to allow you to store multiple versions of an object in the same bucket. After enabling the versioning feature for a bucket, you can search for, delete, or restore the objects stored in the bucket by version ID. This enables you to recover data that was lost due to accidental deletion or application failure. - Bucket replication It is used to allow you to configure the bucket replication rules to automatically and asynchronously replicate incremental objects in different buckets for data disaster recovery and backup. |
| Data Security | Hotlink protection COS supports configuring hotlink protection. You can configure a blocklist/allowlist through the hotlink protection feature in the console to protect your data resources. |
| CAM | - Cross-origin access With COS, you can set cross-origin access in HTML5 standard to enable access across different origins. For cross-origin accesses, COS can respond to OPTIONS requests and return the specified rules to the browser according to the rules set by the developer. - Bucket policy You can add a policy for a bucket to grant or deny an account or source IP (or IP range) access permission for a COS resource. - Access control You can manage the access permissions for your buckets and objects. After receiving a resource request, COS will check the corresponding ACL to verify if the requester has the required access permission. |
| Data monitoring | - Monitoring and Alarms Data such as the COS read-write request volume and traffic are calculated and displayed based on Cloud Monitor. You can view the detailed monitoring data such as the COS read-write request volume and traffic in the Cloud Monitor console. - Viewing Data Overview COS supports data monitoring. You can query the amount and trends of data of different storage types by different time periods through the monitoring data window. |
| Tools | Management Tools COS provides multiple useful tools such as COSBrowser, COSCMD, and COS Migration to help you manage and/or migrate data. |
| API/SDK | APIs: COS offers a rich set of APIs and introduces API usage and parameters, sample requests, sample responses, and error codes. COS offers multiple languages for development: Android, C, C++, .NET, Go, iOS, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, PHP, Python, and Mini Program SDKs. |