Normal users only have access to containers admins give them explicit access to. You can grant access with x-container-read and x-container-write. See second to last paragraph of the first section at http://swift.openstack.org/overview_auth.html (http://swift.openstack.org/overview_a...) Using st as an account admin, you can do something like st post -r account:user -w account:user container to give read and write access to a container.