An apparatus, comprising: a storage system , comprising: a compute engine cloud service that interfaces with a database cloud service , a high performance object storage cloud service different from the database cloud service and a low performance object storage cloud service different from the database cloud service , the high performance object storage cloud service having faster access, by employing faster underlying storage technology, than the low performance object storage cloud service ; the compute engine cloud service 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 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 , the file's meta data pointing to information within the high performance object storage cloud service for accessing stripes of the file stored in the low performance object storage cloud service ; access the information within the high performance object storage cloud service 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 . a compute engine cloud service that interfaces with a database cloud service , a high performance object storage cloud service different from the database cloud service and a low performance object storage cloud service different from the database cloud service , the high performance object storage cloud service having faster access, by employing faster underlying storage technology, than the low performance object storage cloud service ; the compute engine cloud service 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 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 , the file's meta data pointing to information within the high performance object storage cloud service for accessing stripes of the file stored in the low performance object storage cloud service ; access the information within the high performance object storage cloud service 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 . 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 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 , the file's meta data pointing to information within the high performance object storage cloud service for accessing stripes of the file stored in the low performance object storage cloud service ; access the information within the high performance object storage cloud service 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 . <EOS>