Facebook Cookbook

Amazonian Backends: Simple Storage Solution

Problem

My app is going to require me to store a whole big heaping pile of rich-media files, which are huge and are going to gobble up my entire monthly bandwidth allocation in one bite.

Solution

Store your media files (or any files, for that matter) on Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3), part of Amazon’s growing family of web services. Don’t just take it from me—Nat Brown, CTO of iLike, is a big fan of S3:

S3 is a no-brainer if you need to scale out delivery of simple content or provide secure limitless storage. We chose S3 for expediency (we were up and running within a few hours) and usage-based pricing (instead of minimum commits and long-term contracts).

Also, the active open source community, growing commercial ecosystem of products & services around AWS, and the high-quality tools for working with AWS are not only great resources for us but they also indicate that the community will be around for the long-term and so we feel comfortable basing more of our architecture on AWS.

You can read a full interview with Nat about how iLike uses AWS at http://tinyurl.com/3j7hmw (the actual Amazon URL is so long and embarrassingly full of weird parameters that it’s actually unprintable).

Discussion

Back in the bad old days of the first bubble, it used to be that startups had to raise bucket loads of money, which they then handed straight to the network hardware and server makers in exchange for rooms full of gear, which they could then sell at fire ...