Super-Networking Blog

I have started playing with Amazon S3 in the past day or so to see what they can do for the company I work for. We currently use a couple of CDN networks as well as our own network to distribute content.

I started looking into Amazon S3 as an ultra low cost file hosting network and it seems to offer more than that and could answer some potential problems we are running into. If we use them as a content delivery service they are going to be slower and of a lower end user quality then a CDN because they don’t have servers all of the globe like a CDN. They are however cheaper than a CDN and therefore a possible viable alternative to content we currently serve out of our own datacenter.

The other thing I am looking at S3 for other than content delivery is content storage and emergency failover hosting. CDNs typically just cache your information onto their network for faster load times and bandwidth offloading but if you are down for an extended period of time they will have nothing to cache and so then cannot serve it to your customers any longer.

What I am looking to S3 it possible do is to be an emergency middleman for our CDN networks. So if we are down have the CDN networks cache off of S3’s storage. Since S3’s storage is so cheap it makes a great offsite backup solution. I have not worked out the details yet on any of this since I just got our S3 account up and running but I am hopeful.

S3 currently uses an API that you can write a program to use for file uploading, downloading, management etc… You can’t use FTP and it doesn’t sync automatically like a CDN so I have been out looking for some tools that are already out there to get us up and running quickly. Eventually I am sure we can write a program of our own to do it but for the interim some freeware will be just fine.

Here are a couple I have used so far:
S3 Firefox Plugin - This App has a very easy to use interface and great management but uploads are painfully slow.
S3 Java App - This App is less user friendly and the management of the files is lacking but the upload speeds are quite good.

One of the big companies that use Amazon S3 is Smugmug they are using it for the duel purpose of content delivery and backups as well. Check out the CEO’s Blog for some good info on their experience with S3.

Interesting Info on S3 by SmugMug
Slides Presentation