Perbucket

Perbucket is a term used in software engineering to describe a design approach in which data, access control, processing, or quotas are scoped at the level of a logical container known as a bucket. The concept is applied in distributed storage systems, messaging, and data pipelines to partition concerns, improve isolation, and simplify governance.

In object storage and cloud services, a bucket serves as a namespace for stored items. Perbucket principles mean that policies, versioning rules, lifecycle management, and billing are defined and enforced at the bucket level. Objects within a bucket may inherit these settings or override them in limited cases. This boundary often provides easier administration and clearer quotas but can limit fine-grained control at the item level.

In data processing and streaming, perbucket can describe processing flows that are scoped to each bucket, enabling parallelism and isolation. For example, a data pipeline might spin up independent workers per bucket to process events, metrics, or logs.

Implementation considerations include the granularity of the bucket boundary, the distribution of workload across buckets, and the overhead of maintaining metadata. Common techniques include hashing or partitioning to assign items to buckets, and applying security policies using bucket-level access controls.

Perbucket is not a standardized term with a single formal definition. It is used informally in documentation and discussions to describe bucket-scoped architectures and is often contextual to a particular system or vendor.