Where to put shared files on amazon AWS design for failure architecture?

Question

I have a simple LAMP website on AWS. I want at least 2 instances, that will connect to RDS, and I'll have a load balancer. The simple question, not answered on the web is: Where do you put the shared user uploaded files like the images?

NFS should be one answer. I mean,something like create another instance, sharing a folder through NFS and the other instances mount them. But it is a failure point.

Rsync folders between instances ¿?!!

The best answer I found is to use s3fs, and mount an s3 bucket on all my instances. But I don't like to use things not supported by Amazon.

What is the right solution?

Thanks!

SOLUTION

I tried s3fs but I experienced many issues (ie with Eventual Consistency).

So, finally I implemented the AWS SDK and used the S3 library to upload directly to S3. Then pointed a domain to the s3 bucket directly.

Thanks to all

Answer 1

Why not put the files in S3? You don't need to use something like s3fs - just use the regular s3 apis to upload the files to s3.

Users can also upload the files straight to s3 without going via your server if use the post api

Answer 2

Like Frederick said, S3 is probably best, because the only other option is to put them on the load balancer and return them right away. But then if you do multiple load balancers with some kind of Round Robin DNS or something, you are up the creek, and have to copy them all over hell, and it just wont work. And if you are using the ELB, then you can't do that anyway.

Answer 3

As you say, you already are looking at s3fs. You are right - why have an extra layer of software.

Likely better is to generate time limited, signed urls - or if the files are truly public - just make that part of the bucket public, and directly use an s3 url to serve the files. You can also point a DNS at S3, so http://my-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/path/to/file.png becomes files.mycompany.com/path/tofile.png.