This section provides an overview how object storage is structured, including:

All cloud infrastructure resources are organized in Compartments.

A tenancy can include several compartments. A compartment is a logical grouping of resource types. For object storage, compartments help manage the structure of objects that are stored in the cloud.

Compartments can have child-compartments which support multi-level hierarchy of resource grouping.

Each compartment is identified by a unique Oracle Cloud ID (OCID).

When connecting the system to object storage, the compartment identification is part of the required connection configuration information.

There are no hard requirements as to the structure or number of compartment that should be created. A recommended setup is described later in this document and has reference to compartments as well.

The Root Compartment is created for each account and is the top level of the compartments hierarchy. The name of that compartment includes the string "(root)" in it.

Oracle Cloud Object Storage is organized in buckets. A bucket is like a folder or a directory that stores one or more objects. Objects can be any file and can includes documents, images, and so on.

Each compartment can have one or more buckets. Buckets cannot include other buckets.

An example of Object Storage structure can be:

Bucket names are unique within a tenancy which means that the same bucket name cannot be used in different compartments. Compartments have a unique identifier (OCID) so they are in fact unique within the tenancy.

The system can be configured to connect to any compartment and bucket that you define. This configuration is described in the next chapter.