CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpyiiamazon-s3amazon-ec2
Harish Subramanium
Harish Subramanium

Reputation: 17

Amazon S3 for file Uploads and caching

I am currently writing an application using the Yii-framework in PHP that stores a large number of files uploaded by the users of the application. I decided that since the number of files are going to be ever increasing, it would be beneficial to use Amazon S3 to store these files and when requested, the server could retrieve the files and send it to the user. (The server is an EC2 instance in the same zone)

Since the files are all confidential, the server has to verify the identity of the user and their credentials before allowing the user to receive the file. Is there a way to send the file to the user in this case directly from S3 or do I have to pull the data to the server first and then serve it to the user.

If So, Is there any way to cache the recently uploaded files on the local server so that it does not have to go to s3 to look for the file. In most cases, the most recently uploaded files will be requested repeatedly by multiple clients.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1027

Answers (2)

Gary Vernon Grubb
Gary Vernon Grubb

Reputation: 11225

Use AWS Cloud Front to server these static files. Rather than sending the files to the user, send them links to the files. The Links need to be cloud front links & not direct links to the S3 bucket.

This has the benefit of keeping load low on your server as well as caching files close to your users for better performance.

More details here Serving Private Content through CloudFront

Upvotes: 0

Jakobinsky
Jakobinsky

Reputation: 1294

Authenticated clients can download files directly from S3 by signing the appropriate URLs on the server prior to displaying the page/urls to the client.

For more information, see: http://s3.amazonaws.com/doc/s3-developer-guide/RESTAuthentication.html

Note that for confidential files you may also want to consider server-side/client side encryption. Finally, for static files ( such as images ) you may want to set the appropriate cache headers as well.

Upvotes: 1

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