Until recently, I used Google Cloud Storage to periodically store and retrieve a few TB of data. Although Google services and their premium network solution are by far the best solution I worked with (the bandwidth and latency are just incredible from anywhere to anywhere in the World), the price is too expensive for my use case.

Looking at affordable solutions, and after reviewing a dozen solutions going from Digital Ocean, Hetzner, OVH, and more, I decided to go with Scaleway.

Why Scaleway? their object storage solution is cheap (I divided the bill by almost 100 compared to Google Cloud Storage), you have great configuration options to manage privacy, lifecycle rules, and up to 100Gbp/s bandwidth. Furthermore, despite their offer uses the public Internet, the peering is quite good Worldwide, meaning you can expect a good bandwidth even if you download or upload from Australia or the US.

However, nothing is perfect. The Scaleway documentation is quite minimal. There are no official client libraries, nor examples of basic operations like downloading an object from a Scaleway bucket in Java. That’s the purpose of this blog post.

Scaleway mimics the Amazon S3 interface and the Amazon SDK is configurable enough to be used with Scaleway. To use Scaleway Object Storage in Java, you need to first import the Amazon SDK as a dependency.

Here is the dependency to use if you are using Gradle:

implementation 'software.amazon.awssdk:s3:2.16.74'

Did you notice Amazon owns the domain amazon.software? yes, software is a top-level domain.

The next step is to create a client instance:

S3Client.builder()
    .region(Region.of("fr-par"))
    .endpointOverride(URI.create("https://s3.fr-par.scw.cloud"))
    .credentialsProvider(
        StaticCredentialsProvider.create(
            AwsBasicCredentials.create(accessKey, secretKey))
    ).build();

In the code snippet above, accessKey and secretKey are your credentials to get from the Scaleway dashboard.

Once you have a client instance, it is really easy to interact with the Object Storage service. For instance, here is an example to retrieve an object file as an InputStream:

final GetObjectRequest objectRequest =
    GetObjectRequest
        .builder()
        .key("path/to/your/object/file")
        .bucket("your-scaleway-bucket")
        .build();

client.getObject();

Here is a link to Gist for a basic class example:

https://gist.github.com/lpellegr/e2a05f24181c33a65467fbc189a2e115