What is Cloud Storage?
When you create a high-capable photo-sharing service, storage space can be an issue. The traditional way to solve this is to add dedicated storage servers as the site grows.
However, this method involves dealing with specific infrastructure problems, resulting in additional costs. If your core business is to offer people online services rather than host websites, maintenance of storage servers is not the task you want your engineers to be involved with.
To avoid this, it's a good idea to outsource storage to a special file hosting provider. One of the most notable file hosting providers is Amazon, with its Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). It has a number of competitors, such as Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network, or Google Storage. These companies offer a technology called cloud storage. Basically, computing cloud is a special network consisting of thousands of computers. You can get an account in a cloud - a kind of virtual storage server. The system automatically distributes files among multiple facilities of a cloud redundantly, provides load balancing, maintains security, backup, etc. To integrate cloud storage with your website, both Amazon and Nirvanix provide a special API. This architecture allows the system to be easy-to-use, reliable, secure, and fast.
How Image Uploader Can Be Used with Cloud Storages?
The most obvious method of uploading files to Amazon S3, Google Storage or Nirvanix is to transfer them to a web server first. Instead of saving files on a local hard drive, this web server can send files right to cloud storage through web services. This approach is illustrated on a figure below.
This method is easy to use with any upload technology, and you can quickly modify an existing upload code for this purpose. However, it means that you sacrifice a very important feature of cloud storage - a high level of reliability and high speed. If you look at the figure above closely, you will notice a potential bottleneck: your web server. If for some reason your traffic skyrockets, your server will suffer from denial of service until you add more servers or increase a bandwidth. Another issue is that you will have a lot of inbound and outbound traffic.
Fortunately, with Image Uploader you are able to upload files to Amazon S3, Google Storage or Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network directly, bypassing the intermediary web server. This approach is illustrated here:
This approach has a number of clear benefits:
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Upload service remains available even when upload volume increases drastically.
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Upload speed remains high regardless of the number of users uploading their files.
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Your bandwidth is not occupied with heavy inbound and outbound traffic.
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You do not have to write server-side code to process uploads.
The good news is that Image Uploader allows you to do it very easily without heavy coding!