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Managing tenants and client connections

Contributors netapp-lhalbert

As a grid administrator, you create and manage the tenant accounts that S3 and Swift clients use to store and retrieve objects, and manage the configuration options that control how clients connect to your StorageGRID system.

Tenant accounts

A tenant account allows you to specify who can use your StorageGRID system to store and retrieve objects, and which functionality is available to them. Tenant accounts allow client applications that support the S3 REST API or the Swift REST API to store and retrieve objects on StorageGRID. Each tenant account uses either the S3 client protocol or the Swift client protocol.

You must create at least one tenant account for each client protocol that will be used to store objects on your StorageGRID system. Optionally, you can create additional tenant accounts if you want to segregate the objects stored on your system by different entities. Each tenant account has its own federated or local groups and users, and its own buckets (containers for Swift) and objects.

You can use the Grid Manager or the Grid Management API to create tenant accounts. When creating a tenant account, you specify the following information:

  • Display name for the tenant (the tenant's account ID is assigned automatically and cannot be changed).

  • Whether the tenant account will use the S3 or Swift.

  • For S3 tenant accounts: Whether the tenant account is allowed to use platform services. If the use of platform services is allowed, the grid must be configured to support their use.

  • Optionally, a storage quota for the tenant account—​the maximum number of gigabytes, terabytes, or petabytes available for the tenant's objects. A tenant's storage quota represents a logical amount (object size), not a physical amount (size on disk).

  • If identity federation is enabled for the StorageGRID system, which federated group has Root Access permission to configure the tenant account.

  • If single sign-on (SSO) is not in use for the StorageGRID system, whether the tenant account will use its own identity source or share the grid's identity source, and the initial password for the tenant's local root user.

If S3 tenant accounts need to comply with regulatory requirements, grid administrators can enable the global S3 Object Lock setting for the StorageGRID system. When S3 Object Lock is enabled for the system, all S3 tenant accounts can create buckets with S3 Object Lock enabled and then specify retention and legal hold settings for the object versions in that bucket.

After a tenant account is created, tenant users can sign in to the Tenant Manager.

Client connections to StorageGRID nodes

Before tenant users can use S3 or Swift clients to store and retrieve data in StorageGRID, you must decide how these clients will connect to StorageGRID nodes.

Client applications can store or retrieve objects by connecting to any of the following:

  • The Load Balancer service on Admin Nodes or Gateway Nodes. This is the recommended connection.

  • The CLB service on Gateway Nodes.

    Note The CLB service is deprecated.
  • Storage Nodes, with or without an external load balancer.

When configuring StorageGRID so that clients can use the Load Balancer service, you perform the following steps:

  1. Configure endpoints for the Load Balancer service. The Load Balancer service on Admin Nodes or Gateway Nodes distributes incoming network connections from client applications to Storage Nodes. When creating a load balancer endpoint, you specify a port number, whether the endpoint accepts HTTP or HTTPS connections, the type of client (S3 or Swift) that will use the endpoint, and the certificate to be used for HTTPS connections (if applicable).

  2. Optionally specify that a node's Client Network is untrusted to ensure that all connections to the node's Client Network occur on the load balancer endpoints.

  3. Optionally configure high availability (HA) groups. If you create an HA group, the interfaces of multiple Admin Nodes and Gateway Nodes are placed into an active-backup configuration. Client connections are made using the virtual IP address of the HA group.

Related information

Administer StorageGRID