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.
Related
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'm using AjaXplorer to give access to my clients to a shared directory stored in Amazon S3. I installed the SD, configured the plugin (http://ajaxplorer.info/plugins/access/s3/) and could upload and download files but the upload size is limited to my host PHP limit which is 64MB.
Is there a way I can upload directly to S3 without going over my host to improve speed and have S3 limit, no PHP's?
Thanks
I think that is not possible, because the server will first climb to the PHP file and then make transfer to bucket.
Maybe
The only way around this is to use some JQuery or JS that can bypass your server/PHP entirely and stream directly into S3. This involves enabling CORS and creating a signed policy on the fly to allow your uploads, but it can be done!
I ran into just this issue with some inordinately large media files for our website users that I no longer wanted to host on the web servers themselves.
The best place to start, IMHO is here:
https://github.com/blueimp/jQuery-File-Upload
A demo is here:
https://blueimp.github.io/jQuery-File-Upload/
This was written to upload+write files to a variety of locations, including S3. The only tricky bits are getting your MIME type correct for each particular upload, and getting your bucket policy the way you need it.
I have tried looking for an answer to this but I think I am perhaps using the wrong terminology so I figure I will give this a shot.
I have a Rails app where a company can have an account with multiple users each with various permissions etc. Part of the system will be the ability to upload files and I am looking at S3 for storage. What I want is the ability to say that users from Company A can only download the files associated with that company?
I get the impression I can't unless I restrict the downloads to my deployment servers IP range (which will be Heroku) and then feed the files through a controller and a send_file() call. This would work but then I am reading data from S3 to Heroku then back to the user vs. direct from S3 to the user.
If I went with the send_file method can I close off my S3 server to the outside world and have my Heroku app send the file direct?
A less secure idea I had was to create a unique slug for each file and store it under that name to prevent random guessing of files i.e. http://mys3server/W4YIU5YIU6YIBKKD.jpg etc. This would be quick and dirty but not 100% secure.
Amazon S3 Buckets support policies for granting or denying access based on different conditions. You could probably use those to protect your files from different user groups. Have a look at the policy documentation to get an idea what is possible. After that you can switch over to the AWS policy generator to generate a valid policy depending on your needs.
I have a website that allows users to search for music tracks and download those they they select as mp3.
I have the site on my server and all of the mp3s on s3 and then distributed via cloudfront. So far so good.
The client now wishes for users to be able to select a number of music track and then download them all in bulk or as a batch instead of 1 at a time.
Usually I would place all the files in a zip and then present the user a link to that new zip file to download. In this case, as the files are on s3 that would require I first copy all the files from s3 to my webserver process them in to a zip and then download from my server.
Is there anyway i can create a zip on s3 or CF or is there someway to batch / group files in to a zip?
Maybe i could set up an EC2 instance to handle this?
I would greatly appreciate some direction.
Best
Joe
I am afraid you won't be able to create the batches w/o additional processing. firing up an EC2 instance might be an option to create a batch per user
I am facing the exact same problem. So far the only thing I was able to find is Amazon's s3sync tool:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/s3/sync.html
In my case, I am using Rails + its Paperclip addon which means that I have no way to easily download all of the user's images in one go, because the files are scattered in a lot of subdirectories.
However, if you can group your user's files in a better way, say like this:
/users/<ID>/images/...
/users/<ID>/songs/...
...etc., then you can solve your problem right away with:
aws s3 sync s3://<your_bucket_name>/users/<user_id>/songs /cache/<user_id>
Do have in mind you'll have to give your server the proper credentials so the S3 CLI tools can work without prompting for usernames/passwords.
And that should sort you.
Additional discussion here:
Downloading an entire S3 bucket?
s3 is single http request based.
So the answer is threads to achieve the same thing
Java api - uses TransferManager
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaSDK/latest/javadoc/com/amazonaws/services/s3/transfer/TransferManager.html
You can get great performance with multi threads.
There is no bulk download sorry.
We want to be able to have a folder that can securely serve images across a cluster of web servers. What's the best way to handle this with Amazon Web Services (AWS)? Amazon S3? Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)? Amazon Cloudfront?
EDIT: Answer no longer needed...thanks.
I'm not sure what your main goal is or if you have read about the services you ask about. But I will try to explain it as far as I've understood AWS and your choices:
S3 is a STORAGE (with buckets and objects, a sort of folder structure with meta access)
EBS is a VOLUME (these are attached to an EC2 instance as extra drive you can access as a local harddrive)
CloudFront is a WEB-CACHE (you select which datacenter you want them in, and then you point at a S3 bucket and Amazon will replicate the content for you)
So we only need to figure out what you mean by "securely" as there are two options as I see it:
You can protect buckets in the S3 or make access levels with accounts, for "administrator access" only and PUBLIC READABLE...
You can store the data in a EBS volume and keep them there, then they are very secure and NOT public, but shareable (I believe) among the servers (I've planned to check out this myself within the next week)
You cannot protect "cloudfront" data as it's controlled by the Bucket permissions from S3...
Hope you can use this a little. I've not stated anything regarding SPEED nor COST, thats for you to benchmark/test with your data requirements. :o)