Alibaba Cloud Full Stack (4): OSS — Object Storage Done Right

Fri, 01 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

I used to store user uploads on the ECS disk. Profile pictures, PDF invoices, CSV exports — all dumped into /var/data/uploads/ on a single ecs.g7.large running my Flask app. I had a cron job that rsynced the directory to a second ECS instance every six hours as a “backup.” Then one Friday at 3am, the system disk hit 100% because a batch job generated 40GB of reports nobody ever downloaded, the instance went read-only, the app crashed, and the rsync hadn’t run since the previous evening. I lost six hours of user uploads and spent the weekend apologizing to customers. That was the week I learned that object storage is not a nice-to-have — it is the foundation of everything you build in the cloud. Your application server is ephemeral. Your data is not.

Terraform for AI Agents (5): Storage — Vector, Relational, and Object Memory

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Most tutorials gloss over an agent’s memory. ‘Just put the embeddings in Pinecone, the sessions in Postgres, and the screenshots in S3.’ On Aliyun, all three are managed services. Correctly provisioning them with Terraform can mean the difference between a working memory and losing three weeks of conversation history because the disk filled up at 4 AM.

This article covers all three layers, their Terraform configurations, the critical but tedious backup and disaster recovery (DR) setup, the major version upgrade process, and the Saturday outage that changed how I do things.

OSS on Chen Kai Blog

Alibaba Cloud Full Stack (4): OSS — Object Storage Done Right

Terraform for AI Agents (5): Storage — Vector, Relational, and Object Memory