On Tigris, you can set any domain name to point to any bucket. Why does this matter?

Multi-cloud is all the rage these days. A new neocloud pops up every week offering cheap compute, and running your apps on Kubernetes means they’re easily ported to another provider. Compute is fungible, but storage is sticky. Using a custom domain to front your bucket of data makes it easy to swap out storage providers without updating all the code that uses that storage.

Your domain is your brand identity on the Internet. People want to know you as you, not as something or someone else. If your downloads come from yourcompany.com, that looks like they have much more authority than if they come from yourcompany-public-downloads.someprovider-storage.dev. If you are operating in environments that require you to explicitly allowlist egress domains, then many times you don’t need to do anything because your own domain surely is already on that allow list. This makes it easy to glance at a domain name and get a good vibe as to what it’s there for.

Oh, not to mention, you own your domain name. If you want to move to another provider, you just change the domain name over and everything’s migrated. You don’t have to coordinate with the other storage provider, you do it on your schedule.

What we built

So what changed? Before, you had to match your domain name to your bucket name exactly. If you wanted to rebrand your website and change the domain name, you had to migrate your data to a new bucket. And we as an industry are… bad at naming things. Systems should be designed for the users, which means handling renames smoothly. You can now set any custom domain to point to any bucket.

In order to do this, we removed the requirement for your bucket name to match your domain name. Now any bucket can be mapped to any domain name as long as the DNS records match what we expect.

A cool thing about this new mapping is that you can have a custom domain on a private bucket. This setup lets you upload files and then share them out one by one with presigned URLs, giving you the best of both worlds: custom domains to enhance your brand and not having to expose everything to the public.

For example, let’s say you’ve been hosting something like internal packages or test data in a private Tigris bucket. Usually you’d need to reference them directly like this:

<img src="https://your-bucket.fly.storage.tigris.dev/path/to/image.jpeg" />

But you really want to write:

<img src="https://files.yourdomain.com/path/to/image.jpeg" />

To do that with other object storage providers, you’d need to make a new bucket named files.yourdomain.com and copy all the objects over manually. You wouldn’t be able to do it the easy way with the CopyObject call either, you need to download all of the data and then upload it all again. This is doable, but your local SRE probably has a horror story of how that all went wrong in an instant.

Instead, what if you could just set the domain name directly to files.yourdomain.com? This is what Tigris lets you do. All you have to do is the normal custom domain setup:

1. Make a DNS CNAME record from files.yourdomain.com to your-bucket.fly.storage.tigris.dev.
2. Configure files.yourdomain.com as the bucket’s custom domain in the admin panel, or run flyctl storage update your-bucket --custom-domain files.yourdomain.com
3. Update the links to point to the new name.
4. There is no step 4.

Object storage, now with less hassle

Change your domain name? Change your mind? No problem! Tigris works with you because we know that opinions can and will change.

I want that!