I'm hosting an application on AppHarbor that uses NLog for logging. I've been trying the Logentries add-on, which is a nice service to pipe all the application logging through to and then view via their web interface. That has now come to the end of its free trial and I'd like to look at doing my own logging before paying for that service.
Because I'm using AppHarbor, they recommend not writing to the file system because it's wiped on each deploy and, when in flow, I do multiple deployments per day. I'm using S3 for storing images anyway, so it seems natural to store logs there as well.
The problem I can see with that approach is that I would be firing log statements to a text file stored on S3, which I would need to append to. Once the site gets some traffic, there will be multiple, simultaneous calls to store log entries, which will probably end up locking the write mechanism. Is there a better way to do this that I'm not aware of? Maybe batching the log entries somehow before sending them across? I'm using Raven as my database so may look at writing logs directly into Raven if there's no better option.
It doesn't look like there are NLog targets for S3 or RavenDB, but there are a bunch or other options: http://nlog-project.org/wiki/Targets
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It seems cloudbees writes the logs only to stream and not to a file. I need to save my logs. Can I use any option other than papertrail to store/retreive log files? Can I listen to the some input stream and get feed of logs? Can I dump logs directly to Amazon S3?
As filesystem isn't persistent we also don't provide file based logging. We don't provide a platform helper to store logs to S3, as papertrails offers a comparable persistent solution with better performances and dedicated service.
You can for sure use your favorite logging framework and custom extensions to get log stored on S3 or other if you prefer this option.
I have an application that heavily uses the local file system. We need to port the application to use S3. What services are out there that will automate the access to the S3 without having to changing the source code of the application.
These services somehow mask the S3 FS as a local FS.
Thanks.
See FuseOverAmazon (or s3fs) but keep in mind that S3 is an eventual consistency data store and your app should be architected to take that into account. It's also important to note that trying to mount an S3 bucket as a file system has very poor performance.
Take a look at RioFS. Our project is an alternative to “s3fs” project, main advantages comparing to “s3fs” are: simplicity, the speed of operations and bugs-free code. Currently the project is in the “beta” state, but it's been running on several high-loaded fileservers for quite some time.
We are seeking for more people to join our project and help with the testing. From our side we offer quick bugs fix and will listen to your requests to add new features.
Hope it helps !
I want to upload pictures to the AWS s3 through the iPhone. Every user should be able to upload pictures but they must remain private for each one of them.
My question is very simple. Since I have no real experience with servers I was wondering which of the following two approaches is better.
1) Use some kind of token vending machine system to grant the user access to the AWS s3 database to upload directly.
2) Send the picture to the EC2 Servlet and have the virtual server place it on the S3 storage.
Edit: I would also need to retrieve, should i do it directly or through the servlet?
Thanks in advance.
Hey personally I don't think it's a good idea to use token vending machine to directly upload the data via the iPhone, because it's much harder to control the access privileges, etc. If you have a chance use ec2 and servlet, but that will add costs to your solution.
Also when dealing with S3 you need to take in consideration that some files are not available right after you save them. Look at this answer from S3 FAQ.
For retrieving data directly from S3 you will need to deal with the privileges issue again. Check the access model for S3, but again it's probably easier to manage the access for non public files via the servlet. The good news is that there is no data transfer charge for data transferred between EC2 and S3 within the same region.
Another important point to consider the latter solution
High performance in handling load and network speeds within amazon ecosystem. With direct uploads the client would have to handle complex asynchronous operations of multipart uploads etc instead of focusing on the presentation and rendering of the image.
The servlet hosted on EC2 would be way more powerful than what you can do on your phone.
With Amazon S3, can I stop a query-string-authorized download that is in progress?
Are there other file download services that provide such a feature?
I'm not aware of a built in way to do this. If I understand your goal, you want to potentially stop an HTTP response mid-stream based on some custom rules you have. Is that right?
If so, perhaps you could write a very thin proxy to S3 that encapsulates this logic. If you ran the proxy on EC2 you wouldn't incur any additional bandwidth fees.
The downside is that you would have manage scaling the proxy (i.e. add more EC2 nodes based on traffic) so depending on your scaling requirements, this could require a bit of work. But the proxy script itself would probably be fairly trivial. Something like:
Make streaming HTTP request to S3 for object
for each x byte chunk in response from S3:
Check auth condition. Continue if valid. Break if not.
Send chunk to caller
I'm not aware of anyone that allows this. In general, the authentication is only checked once, when you begin downloading, but not thereafter.
Can you describe what you're trying to do more broadly?
On an app server in which a few source files change frequently, Is the following approach recommended?
Use a cron job with S3tools to sync the source files with S3 private bucket (every 15 mins for example).
On server start up - Use user data script to sync with the sources bucket to retrieve the latest sources.
Advantages:
1. No need to attach EBS for app server just to save a few files
2. Similar setup to all app servers
3. Sources automatically backed up.
4. As a byproduct, distributes code to multiple app servers automatically.
Disadvantages:
keeping source code on S3
other?
What do you think about this methodology? Is this the right way to use EC2 when source code change frequently (a few times a day) please recommend the best approach to run EC2 instances where sources change often.
I think you're better off using a proper source code repository, like Subversion or Git, rather than storing the source files on S3. That way you can have a central location for the source files while avoiding the update consistency problems that kdgregory mentioned.
You can put the source repository on one of your own servers outside of EC2, or host it on an EC2 instance (make sure the repository files are on an EBS volume in the latter case).
If you're going to be running a large number of EC2 instances, then it will be less effort to have them sync themselves from a central location (ie, you sync to private bucket, app-servers sync from that bucket).
HOWEVER, recognize that updates to an S3 bucket are atomic only at the object level, and more importantly, are not guaranteed to be immediately consistent (although I recall seeing a recent note that the us-west endpoint does offer read-after-write consistency).
This means that your app-servers may load a set of new files that are internally inconsistent -- some will be old, some will be new. If this is a problem for you, then you should implement a scheme that uploads directly to the app-servers, and ensures changeset consistency (perhaps by uploading to a temporary directory that is then renamed).