The Object Storage service (swift) uses rings to distribute partition space across the cluster. Rings are core to the data durability engine, enabling the Object Storage service to synchronize each partition efficiently.

Rings contain information about Object Storage partitions and how partitions are distributed among the different nodes and disks in your Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift (RHOSO) deployment. When any Object Storage component interacts with data, a quick lookup is performed locally in the ring to determine the possible partitions for each object.

The Object Storage service has three rings to store the following types of data:

• Account information
• Containers, to facilitate organizing objects under an account
• Object replicas