Amazon S3 File/Data Storage & Mirroring
Summary
Amazon has established itself in the past 2 to 3 years as a dominant force in the area of Cloud Computing. It's release of large scale computing, queueing, and file storage server networks, have created an ecosystem that allows for flexible, but instinctive, scaling.
To the general public, Amazon is seen as the e-commerce website, responsible for the sale of books, devices, and music. However behind the scenes, Amazon's decision to create a large infrastructure of server farms that will scale to a application's needs, has catered strongly to web development firms.
Their decision to work on a pay-per-usage model have given web development firms the capacity to create powerful, large scale networks, with less effort being required on the management of those resources.
Integration
Our current integration with Amazon Web Services focus around their implement of S3, their file based storage system.
Clearmix has a unique need for large scale file storage and mirroring due to the media that your community generates. When a user uploads a 100 megabyte video, that video then needs to be encoded, which often times results in a 20% boost in file size. This means that if your community uploads 1000 videos of this size a month, then the total file storage required to host these files are around: (1000*100+1000*120)=220000 megabyte, or 220 gigabytes.
This enormous requirement increases as time increases. In your second month, it will have double to half a terabyte, and so on. Our integration with Amazon S3 allows us to handle your video needs securely, and scale accordingly. All date is therefore kept in a variety of places, working as redundant backups of each other. Content is served off our CDN which mirrors our Amazon S3 storage system, as well as keeping a local copy through our dedicated servers. This arrangement allows for easy scaling of your video and media needs, as well as local file storage copies for any possible file manipulation that would be required in the future.
Result
The result of our integration with Amazon S3 is something that we're very proud of. Your community's media will be served off our CDN partner (SimpleCDN) which mirrors our Amazon S3 File Storage system. Your content is distributed globally to be accessible at high speeds regardless of geography, and is virtually located on one of the most trusted file storage backbones available today.
Additionally, your media is backed up locally through our dedicated servers, away from the cloud, as a pre-caution, but additionally for any possible file changes that need to go on later on (for example, extra video encoding dimensions or versions, image resizing/resampling, etc.)
The summary of this integration leads to our clients feeling safe and confident that their media is placed in a scalable, optimized infrastructure that can meet peak demands, as well as enormous file size requirements.
