Are there any Unforseen Difficulties with Offloading Image Storage to Amazon CloudFront using C#?

I'm contemplating the use of Amazon's CloudFront service to offload my web applications image/file storage from my web host.

Users of my app can upload images, the image is named and the path is stored in a database. I'm thinking of just having the app upload the image to CloudFront and then change the path to use the CloudFront service. Shouldn't be too hard...

I've read of other developers using CloudFront for static images and haven't seen too much about using it for the primary storage of images that can be uploaded/deleted at any time.

My app is ASP.NET MVC based, using C#. Has anyone used C# to setup an upload to CloudFront, from the user's uploaded file?

Anyone recommend against this? The pricing looks affordable and the speed looks fantastic. The only thing that comes to mind would be in developing it, are there any technical difficulties in developing this that I'm unaware of?

Should just be a simple file upload as long as my web app has write permissions, am I correct?

Thanks in advance!

As with all newer technologies, do expect a tat of technical difficulty somewhere along the road but from what I read, it seems relatively safe. For sake of disclosure, and balance, I should mention a 7 month study by the University of New South Wales in Australia found some notable inconsistencies in the bandwidth/responsiveness within individual cloud hosting providers.
Another concern is the possible hikes in pricing of "cloud" services. Providers are, at the moment, all in the process of getting market share; will they eventually try more realistic prices...

Another remark, however, is that it seems that your are keeping a traditionally hosted application and merely putting the file server in the cloud. This strikes me a bit as odd, since file serving is a cheap, easily scalable resource in the single-server type configuration (except of course if you plan on a home run and have your application see traffic like that of Google ;-) ). Could it be that the traditional hosting provider has hiked his per-Megabyte rate ?

Actually, I was looking to avoid issues with data-synchronization in cloud hosting... not that I'm an expert, but I've read it can be difficult to port a web app directly from a single host to the cloud.Putting the images on cloud hosting would offload a majority of the file/bandwidth usage from my host (which would only be doing the work of loading ASP.NET MVC pages and DB calls). jQuery, maps, street views are all offloaded to Google CDN... images would remove the rest of the "heavy lifting".

Chad 2009-10-14 05:21:20

@Chad I understand better now. Depending on type of files you are talking about (and on the user traffic) even file-serving can become a bear. Also this approach can help you get "your feet wet" with the technology and as things mature, you may eventually move the single server MVC-type app as well. Do beware of price/service stability, though for the foreseeable future you may as well enjoy the cheaper ride..

mjv 2009-10-14 05:31:09

@Chad, got that url about the study that found inconsistencies in service on the cloud.

mjv 2009-10-14 05:55:15

@mjv, looking at it now. Thank you.

Chad 2009-10-14 05:58:07

@mjv, I think I'm going to run with it anyway. It would allow me to extend my services, perhaps even letting users upload video. Something that would consume more resources than I'd like on my current hosting. Plus the obvious advantages of a CDN. Most of my users are in Japan, my site is hosted out of the U.S. Thanks for the answer.

Chad 2009-10-14 10:16:50

@mjv, Thanks for attempting to answer my poorly worded "question". I did provoke some thought on my end, much appreciated.

Chad 2009-10-15 22:30:59

@Chad Glad to act a bit as a "sounding board". I like the SO format for that reason: asking good, or even initially weak questions forces one to think about the issues at hand and often to resolve them on his/her own.Thk you for the kind words and the rep points (actually I maxed out today; thks all the same!)

mjv 2009-10-15 23:13:13

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Are there any Unforseen Difficulties with Offloading Image Storage to Amazon CloudFront using C#?

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