An apparatus, comprising: a storage system, comprising: a compute engine cloud service (201, 301) that interfaces with a database cloud service (202, 302), a high performance object storage cloud service (203, 303) different from the database cloud service (202, 302) and a low performance object storage cloud service (204, 304) different from the database cloud service (202, 302), the high performance object storage cloud service (203, 303) having faster access, by employing faster underlying storage technology, than the low performance object storage cloud service (204, 304); the compute engine cloud service (201, 301) to perform the following: accept a filepath from a user that specifies a file; form, based on the filepath, a primary key for a representation of the file; apply the primary key to the database cloud service (202, 302) to obtain a representation of the file, the representation of the file comprising an inode for the file's meta data; use the inode for the file's meta data to obtain the file's meta data from the high performance object storage cloud service (203, 303), the file's meta data pointing to information within the high performance object storage cloud service (203, 303) for accessing stripes of the file stored in the low performance object storage cloud service (204, 304); access the information within the high performance object storage cloud service (203, 303) to obtain an object ID for a stripe within the file; use the object ID to access the stripe from the low performance object storage cloud service (204, 304). a compute engine cloud service (201, 301) that interfaces with a database cloud service (202, 302), a high performance object storage cloud service (203, 303) different from the database cloud service (202, 302) and a low performance object storage cloud service (204, 304) different from the database cloud service (202, 302), the high performance object storage cloud service (203, 303) having faster access, by employing faster underlying storage technology, than the low performance object storage cloud service (204, 304); the compute engine cloud service (201, 301) to perform the following: accept a filepath from a user that specifies a file; form, based on the filepath, a primary key for a representation of the file; apply the primary key to the database cloud service (202, 302) to obtain a representation of the file, the representation of the file comprising an inode for the file's meta data; use the inode for the file's meta data to obtain the file's meta data from the high performance object storage cloud service (203, 303), the file's meta data pointing to information within the high performance object storage cloud service (203, 303) for accessing stripes of the file stored in the low performance object storage cloud service (204, 304); access the information within the high performance object storage cloud service (203, 303) to obtain an object ID for a stripe within the file; use the object ID to access the stripe from the low performance object storage cloud service (204, 304). accept a filepath from a user that specifies a file; form, based on the filepath, a primary key for a representation of the file; apply the primary key to the database cloud service (202, 302) to obtain a representation of the file, the representation of the file comprising an inode for the file's meta data; use the inode for the file's meta data to obtain the file's meta data from the high performance object storage cloud service (203, 303), the file's meta data pointing to information within the high performance object storage cloud service (203, 303) for accessing stripes of the file stored in the low performance object storage cloud service (204, 304); access the information within the high performance object storage cloud service (203, 303) to obtain an object ID for a stripe within the file; use the object ID to access the stripe from the low performance object storage cloud service (204, 304).