Storage concepts

Overview

This article explains the conceptual foundation of storage in Ottili Cloud* — not the ordering flow, but the mental model: what kinds of storage exist, how they relate, how they attach to compute, and how your data stays durable and isolated. The operational, feature-focused article is [Cloud storage](/docs/cloud-storage); this article provides the concepts behind it.

Ottili Cloud is part of Ottili ONE and shares the same account, the same company context and the same role model as the rest of the platform. Storage is therefore not a standalone product with its own credentials, but a platform-bound resource that belongs to your company (tenant).

Two storage primitives

Ottili Cloud distinguishes two conceptually separate kinds of storage:

• Block volumes*: attachable, persistent disks. A volume behaves like a disk attached to exactly one compute instance. That is where the instance's filesystem, database or workload state lives.
• Object storage*: durable, addressable storage for unstructured data — backups, build artifacts, static assets and exports. Object storage is not bound to a single instance; workloads reach it through the Unified API and the cloud APIs.

The distinction matters conceptually: block volumes are *bound to an instance* and are logically tied to its lifecycle unless they are explicitly managed as independent, re-attachable volumes. Object storage is *decoupled* and outlives the lifecycle of individual instances.

How storage attaches to compute

Storage is consumed by compute. The conceptual picture:

1. You launch a compute instance (virtual machine) through the Early Access program.

2. You attach a block volume to that instance — the instance sees it as a local disk.

3. The workload writes artifacts, logs or exports to object storage.

4. Backups and snapshots persist the state of volumes and instances into durable storage.

Compute is reachable through Early Access today; the storage and networking categories it depends on are planned and not yet orderable*. When storage becomes available, volumes and buckets attach to exactly this picture — see [Cloud compute](/docs/cloud-compute) and [Cloud storage](/docs/cloud-storage).

Durability and redundancy

Object storage is designed to hold data durably and immutably. Backup and restore depend on durable storage being available. Concrete durability tiers, redundancy zones and recovery targets (RTO/RPO) are not yet defined as generally available SLAs today — we do not publish SLAs that are not yet specified.

Isolation and tenant boundary

Every storage resource belongs to exactly one company. The company (company_id) is the tenant boundary*: your volumes and buckets are separated from those of other companies. The company context is not derived from a membership or a default; it is derived from the verified token and enforced deny-by-default — identical to the rest of Ottili ONE. Who may create, attach, read or delete volumes is governed by the same role and permission model as everywhere else; see [Roles and permissions](/docs/roles-and-permissions) and [Cloud projects](/docs/cloud-projects).

Encryption

The encryption claims for public surfaces follow the canonical encryption-facts registry:

• In transit*: all connections are encrypted with TLS.
• Backup at rest*: backup data can be encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM* when backup encryption is enabled. It is opt-in and requires a passphrase — it is not described as a blanket default guarantee for all storage.
• Any finer-grained encryption posture for volumes and buckets will only be documented once it is actually available, and never described as available before it is.

Status and availability

The status stages for Ottili Cloud and its storage primitives:

• Ottili Cloud (platform)*: Early Access (Beta).
• Compute*: Private Beta (Early Access) — reachable through the Early Access program today.
• Storage (block volumes, object storage)*: Planned* — part of the Ottili Cloud platform build-out, not yet orderable.
• Networking and backups*: Planned.

Storage provisioning is not described as available today. When storage becomes reachable through Early Access, the operational steps will be documented and the feature status will be shown on the product and status pages. Request Early Access to get started.

Related articles

• [Ottili Cloud overview](/docs/ottili-cloud): the Ottili ONE cloud infrastructure offering.
• [Cloud storage](/docs/cloud-storage): the feature-focused storage description.
• [Cloud compute](/docs/cloud-compute): the instances that volumes attach to.
• [Cloud security](/docs/cloud-security): the cloud isolation and security model.
• [Cloud projects](/docs/cloud-projects): the scope that groups resources.
• [Cloud quotas](/docs/cloud-quotas): capacity governance, as introduced.