Dear All

Does anyone use Amazon AWS?

I know very little about it, and what I have read has just confused me further, yet it has been suggested as a solution to my storage problems.

I run a photo intensive forum. We have to be very ruthless in deleting photos to keep within our data storage (we are hosted in IPB Cloud)

As I understand it, I set up an AWS account, link it to my forum and then, when members post photos they are stored on AWS and therefore don't use our forum storage. When a member views a photo, it is viewed from storage and that the entire process is invisible to members - it looks the same as it does now. Is that about right??

What does AWS cost? They have a cost calculator on Amazon, but it asks questions I don't even understand, let alone be able to answer!

How difficult is it to set up at the forum end? 

Is it truly invisible to our members?

Any help gratefully received!

All the best

Bill

 

Would love a tutorial or how-to on setting this up, from start to finish.  

The disk allocations seem pretty tight on CiC. I will never have the activity to require a 'big' plan but images accumulate over time and I can see disk space becoming an issue even for a non-photo-intensive forum.

You're just wanting to use S3 for storage? I'm sure we can write something up for you.

 

12 minutes ago, Lindy said:

You're just wanting to use S3 for storage? I'm sure we can write something up for you.

 

3 hours ago, Bill Edwards said:

As I understand it, I set up an AWS account, link it to my forum and then, when members post photos they are stored on AWS and therefore don't use our forum storage. When a member views a photo, it is viewed from storage and that the entire process is invisible to members - it looks the same as it does now. Is that about right??

If my description is just about how it works, then an idiots guide would be great

Many thanks

as per my understanding   : first year is free for 5 gb storage..........

we need to create a bucket in s3.... and once done we have to share the settings (credentials) in IPS admin...

 

and it will start working

3 minutes ago, Saurabh Jain said:

as per my understanding   : first year is free for 5 gb storage..........

we need to create a bucket in s3.... and once done we have to share the settings (credentials) in IPS admin...

 

and it will start working

Many thanks.....

Our current storage here is 7gb - when set up does the entire 7gb get moved to S3? How do I work out what 7gb costs? It also talks about puts and gets. How do I work them out? I appreciate the help, but there are so many unknowns just to work out a rough cost. And that's before I attempt to get it working.

 

 

13 hours ago, Bill Edwards said:

Many thanks.....

Our current storage here is 7gb - when set up does the entire 7gb get moved to S3?

You can pick which files will be moved to Amazon. For example: I use it for all attachments, but not the profile images. 

 

13 hours ago, Bill Edwards said:

How do I work out what 7gb costs? It also talks about puts and gets. How do I work them out? I appreciate the help, but there are so many unknowns just to work out a rough cost. And that's before I attempt to get it working.

You don’t pay for just the file space alone, but also for the actual usage – i.e. how often and how much data is uploaded and downloaded. Some of these things might be available from you server statistics, if you have access to them. 

On 12/26/2015 at 5:19 PM, Lindy said:

You're just wanting to use S3 for storage? I'm sure we can write something up for you.

 

I know I am impatient  But any news on a guide please??

I'm setting this up at the moment, run into a brick wall. Setup bucket, set up keys, but told by tech support I need to add permissions and I'm baffled, A guide would be REALLY helpful...

On 1/13/2016 at 1:30 PM, Bill Edwards said:

I know I am impatient  But any news on a guide please??

Sorry - slipped my mind. Here's a quick, general how-to.

 

I wish I had that yesterday...

I didn't set a user and created api keys for the whole account  presume, it works. Is this now a security issue as I haven't added a user?

For those of you wanting to estimate costs this may help:

http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

Its still very hard to estimate costs until you begin using it but it should allow you to play with the numbers and see how things affect the price.

15 hours ago, Lenny Warren said:

I wish I had that yesterday...

I didn't set a user and created api keys for the whole account  presume, it works. Is this now a security issue as I haven't added a user?

If you have other things on your AWS account, yes, I'd recommend you set it up properly. If someone were to get your account-level keys through IPS4, they'd have unrestricted account to your AWS account... they could delete your resources, launch instances you'd be responsible for, etc. 

On 01/03/2016 at 0:58 AM, Lindy said:

If you have other things on your AWS account, yes, I'd recommend you set it up properly. If someone were to get your account-level keys through IPS4, they'd have unrestricted account to your AWS account... they could delete your resources, launch instances you'd be responsible for, etc. 

Ok, thanks @Lindy I'll deal with that... cheers. Presumably if I do this it shouldn't affect the files that IPS4 is currently using from S3?

5 hours ago, Lenny Warren said:

Ok, thanks @Lindy I'll deal with that... cheers. Presumably if I do this it shouldn't affect the files that IPS4 is currently using from S3?

Nope.

Thanks for that screencast! Exactly the steps someone like me needs to see or read.

A default ARN did not magically appear under my cursor for that step but pausing the video allowed me to see the syntax clearly enough to enter mine correctly. (You'd be surprised how hard it is for a person with severe astigmatism to count repeated colon characters ) 

May I ask anyone who has used S3: are there any downsides or risks for storing attachments and gallery images?

It seems like a pretty useful solution. In my case the bandwidth/throughput cost risk is  low (one forum is ultra low volume and the other is relatively low-volume) —  it's mostly just the accumulation of files and images over the years that will gradually outgrow the CiC space allotments. Probably my biggest fears are downtime or some sort of unrecoverable loss of data (possibly during the transitions into or out of S3 use).

I've been using it for a week or so now @bradl and had no cause to complain, (apart from issues setting it up) performs just as well as before, with an almost limitless space for images. I had issues years ago when my old forum outgrew my VPS storage. This way the Amazon S3 can scale with my forum.

Also S3 should be rock solid, probably more so than my VPS.