CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-servicesamazon-s3architecture
Jay
Jay

Reputation: 2454

serving user content/images from amazon s3

I am building an app which lets users upload pictures and share it with his/her friends only.

  1. I am using spring restful services to upload content directly to s3.
  2. The user is authorized using OAuth.
  3. To upload an image an authorized user's js client invokes POST /images/{userid}
  4. To download the image, the client has to invoke GET /images/{userid}/{imageid}

Each user's content is stored in s3 under his own folder name, and the downloading service as explained in point 4 is the one that has to be invoked. Unfortunately, this means I cannot assign this url as source to an image tag <img src="">, because the authorization token should be sent on GET request. I cannot make the contents of user folder public because only user and his friends are allowed to see the images. The current service will soon become a bottleneck and I would like to avoid that.

What is the recommended architecture/design to solve this problem?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2353

Answers (2)

Prag
Prag

Reputation: 54

The flow for downloading the images would be like this

User invokes GET request to download image

  • At Server End
    • Authenticate user
    • Query DB for metadata
    • Create a time based auth token.
    • Create a image URL(S3 based) and append auth token created in previous step
  • At the client end(User browser) redirect user to new URL(this url is effectively S3 location+auth token )
  • Now direct request will comes at the server( image URL+ auth token)
    • authenticate the token and then show image to user

Above URL will not be valid for long time , but your images are secured. As auth token is time based it will cater your case like if some one make the image private/public remove a friend.Deleted images , Copy paste of image url etc ..

Upvotes: 1

Mark B
Mark B

Reputation: 200446

Instead of having a service that loads and returns the entire image file from S3, you should have a service that simply generates an S3 presigned URL. Then the URL retrieved from that service can be used in the <img src=""> tags on your site. This will be much more performant since the web browser will ultimately download the image directly from S3, while also still being secure.

Upvotes: 2

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