Metadata attachment to storage objects within object store

A non-transitory machine readable medium comprising instructions for performing a method, which when executed by a machine, causes the machine to:

• maintain an object, comprising a plurality of slots populated with data of one or more snapshots of a file system of a client device, within an object store of a cloud computing environment;
• offload processing and resource utilization from the client device to an analytics application hosted within the cloud computing environment for executing analytic processing upon the object to generate analytics information relating to access statistics for the object;
• attach the analytics information as metadata to an object header of the object while preserving accessibility to user data stored within in-use slots as in-use data and preserving a read only attribute of the object maintained as a pseudo read only object where the in-use data of the object is unmodifiable and unused or freed data within unused slots of the object is modifiable;
• and
• selectively provide a first application with access to the user data within the in-use slots and the analytics information stored as the metadata within the object header and provide a second application with access to the user data within the in-use slots of the object and restrict the second application from access to the analytics information within the header of the object, wherein modify operations targeting the in-use data within the in-use slots are blocked and modify operations targeting the unused or freed data within the unused slots are allowed while the read only attribute is maintained for the object without compromising the read only attribute.

A computing device comprising:

• a memory comprising machine executable code for performing a method;
• and
• a processor coupled to the memory, the processor configured to execute the machine executable code to cause the processor to:
• maintain an object, comprising a plurality of slots populated with data of one or more snapshots of a file system of a client device, within an object store of a cloud computing environment;
• offload processing and resource utilization from the client device to an analytics application hosted within the cloud computing environment for executing analytic processing upon the object to generate analytics information relating to access statistics for the object;
• attach the analytics information as metadata to an object header of the object while preserving accessibility to user data stored within in-use slots as in-use data and preserving a read only attribute of the object maintained as a pseudo read only object where the in-use data of the object is unmodifiable and unused or freed data within unused slots of the object is modifiable;
• and
• selectively provide a first application with access to the user data within the in-use slots and the analytics information stored as the metadata within the object header and provide a second application with access to the user data within the in-use slots of the object and restrict the second application from access to the analytics information within the header of the object, wherein modify operations targeting the in-use data within the in-use slots are blocked and modify operations targeting the unused or freed data within the unused slots are allowed while the read only attribute is maintained for the object without compromising the read only attribute.