In Enterprise Edition we support data storage in Azure Blob Storage or any S3 compatible storage (i.e. AWS S3).

How we store files

Supervisely uses DATA_PATH from .env (defaults to /supervisely/data) to keep caches, database and etc. But we are interested in storage subfolder generated content, like uploaded images or neural networks are stored.

You can find two subfolders here:

• <something>-public/

• <something>-private/

That's because we maintain the same structure in local storage as if you would use a remote storage. In that case those two folders are buckets or containers. You may notice that one has "public" in it's name, but it only reflects the kind of data we store in it. Both buckets are private and does not provide anonymous read.

Configure Supervisely to use S3

Edit .env configuration file - you can find it by running supervisely where command.

Change STORAGE_PROVIDER from http (local hard drive) to minio (S3 storage backend).

Also, you need to provide STORAGE_ACCESS_KEY and STORAGE_SECRET_KEY credentials along with endpoint of your S3 storage.

For example, here are settings for Amazon S3:

• STORAGE_ENDPOINT=s3.amazonaws.com

• STORAGE_PORT=443

So in the end, here is how your .env settings could look like:

JUPYTER_DOWNLOAD_FILES_BEFORE_START=true
STORAGE_JUPYTER_SYNC=true
STORAGE_PROVIDER=minio
STORAGE_ENDPOINT=s3.amazonaws.com
STORAGE_PORT=443
STORAGE_ACCESS_KEY=<hidden>
STORAGE_SECRET_KEY=<hidden>

Configure Supervisely to use Azure Blob Storage

Edit .env configuration file - you can find it by running supervisely where command.

Change STORAGE_PROVIDER from http (local hard drive) to azure (Azure storage backend).

Also, you need to provide STORAGE_ACCESS_KEY (your storage account name) and STORAGE_SECRET_KEY (secret key) credentials along with endpoint of your blob storage.

Here is how your .env settings could look like:

JUPYTER_DOWNLOAD_FILES_BEFORE_START=true
STORAGE_JUPYTER_SYNC=true
STORAGE_ACCESS_KEY=<account name>
STORAGE_ENDPOINT=https://<account name>.blob.core.windows.net
STORAGE_PROVIDER=azure
STORAGE_SECRET_KEY=<secret key 88 chars long or so: aflmg+wg23fWA+6gAafWmgF4a>

Migration from local storage

Now, copy your current storage to an S3. As we mentioned before, because we maintain the same structure in local filesystem, copying will be enough.

We suggest to use minio/mc to copy the files.

Run minio/mc docker image and execute the following commands:

mc config host add s3 https://s3.amazonaws.com <YOUR-ACCESS-KEY> <YOUR-SECRET-KEY>
mc cp <DATA_STORAGE_FROM_HOST>/<your-buckets-prefix>-public s3/<your-buckets-prefix>-public/
mc cp <DATA_STORAGE_FROM_HOST>/<your-buckets-prefix>-private s3/<your-buckets-prefix>-private/

Finally, restart services to apply new configuration: supervisely up -d.

Keys from IAM Role

If you want to use IAM Role you must specify STORAGE_IAM_ROLE=<role_name> in .env file then STORAGE_ACCESS_KEY and STORAGE_SECRET_KEY variables can be ommited.

IAM Roles are only supported for AWS S3.

Frontend caching

Since AWS and Azure can be quite price in case of heavy reads, we enable image caching by default.

If the image is not in the preview cache but in the STORAGE cache it will be generated and put into previews cache, but it will not be fetched from the remote server.

Here are the default values (you can alter them via docker-compose.override.yml file):

services:
  proxy:
    environment:
      CACHE_PREVIEWS_SIZE: 1g
      CACHE_PREVIEWS_EXPIRES: 12h
      CACHE_STORAGE_SIZE: 10g
      CACHE_STORAGE_EXPIRES: 7d
      CACHE_IMAGE_CONVERTER_SIZE: 10g
      CACHE_IMAGE_CONVERTER_EXPIRES: 7d

Links plugin cloud providers support

If you already have some files on Amazon S3/Google Cloud Storage/Azure Storage and you don't want to upload and store those files in Supervisely, you can use the "Links" plugin to link the files to Supervisely server.

Instead of uploading actual files (i.e. images), you will need to upload .txt file(s) that contains a list of URLs to your files. If your URLs are publicly available (i.e. link looks like https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/test1/abc and you can open it in your web browser directly), then you can stop reading and start uploading.

If your files are protected, however, you will need to create a configuration file for Supervisely. Example configuration file:

# s3 example
my-car-datasets:
  provider: minio
  endpoint: s3.amazonaws.com
  access_key: <your access key>
  secret_key: <your secret key>
  # iam_role: <or just use your iam role>
  region: eu-central-1
  # array of buckets
  buckets:
  - cars_2020_20_10
  - cars_2020_10_10
​
# azure example
my-boats-datasets:
  provider: azure
  endpoint: https://<account name>.blob.core.windows.net
  access_key: <account name>
  secret_key: <secret key 88 chars long or so: aflmg+wg23fWA+6gAafWmgF4a>
  # array of buckets
  buckets:
  - boats_bucket_2020_20_10
  - another_boats_bucket_2020_10_10

Links file structure:

<provider name>://<bucket name>/<object name>

Links file example:

s3://cars_2020_20_10/truck.jpg
azure://boats_bucket_2020_20_10/supersonicboat.jpg

Create a new file docker-compose.override.yml under cd $(sudo supervisely where):

services:
  http-storage:
    volumes:
    - <path to the configuration file>:/remote_links.yml:ro

Then execute the following to apply the changes:

sudo supervisely up -d http-storage