Storage with Amazon S3

Question

My website publishes news along with photos and videos. Right now my videos and images are being hosted on the web server only and they are occupying HDD space day by day. Adding or increasing HDD will not solve my issue as this will also create similar problem in future again.

Here are some doubts to be clarified.

• Can I utilize Amazon S3 service to resolve my issue?
• Will that work as HDD for reading images and videos from S3?
• Will there be any performance issue when comparing normal HDD?
• Can I completely & blindly rely on their services without worrying about backuping my storage?

Answer 1

Ram, you sure ask a lot of questions.

1. Yes, your problem is the one S3 is intended to solve.

2. No, you cannot (easily) mount S3 as a file system. There is a simple but somewhat arcane method for getting files into S3; you can use HTTP to get them back out.

3. Well, it's certainly slower than an attached HDD; whether that will be an issue for you, I cannot say.

4. They make fairly extravagant claims about their reliability and I have never heard of anyone having a problem, but you have to look at the value of your files, their publish reliability claims, and the costs of backup, then make your decision.

I personally use and like S3. It's cheap and (so far) reliable, but there's a reason that "YMMV" is such a widely used phrase.

Answer 2

Ram,

it is possible to mount Amazon S3 like local drive or folder.

If your webserver is running Windows, you can mount Amazon S3 as a Windows Drive by using TntDrive and by using FuseOverAmazon if you are on Linux.

UPD: there are two storage class types on Amazon, Standard storage class is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year and designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities. Reduced redundancy storage class is a bit cheaper but provides less durability - 99.99%

Answer 3

I would also suggest that you look at Amazon CloudFront for hosting your images. It is a CDN that integrates seamlessly with S3. While it will add some negligible costs you con turn t on with a few clicks. Check out our blog post on how you can do that http://blog.cloudberrylab.com/2009/04/how-to-host-media-files-on-amazon-s3.html

I'd also like to add that Amazon S3 has always been very reliable.

Answer 4

While this is probably not a solution in your case, there are several programs for mounting S3 buckets as file systems. http://code.google.com/p/s3ql/wiki/other_s3_filesystems gives an overview of some.