Proper Amazon AWS S3 usage

Heres a quick rundown. We have two apps. Both apps are different from each other in every aspect.

Our first app is a company profile (4 page layout: home, products, about, contact). I don't think it will generate the same traffic as social web sites online. It allows staff members to post product photos. 开发者_JAVA技巧Is it better to have an AWS S3 account to store this content on? Or would I be better off storing the files on the local web server?

Our second app is more social oriented. Here, we have decided to use an S3 bucket for this app. Since we already have an AWS account, should we create a bucket for the first app on this AWS account? Or will this just render more expenses in the long run? What are your thoughts?

On another note. Should app related content (logo, icons, background images, buttons, etc) be stored on the S3 account or on the local server? What is the general consensus on this?

I would keep anything that is "hard-coded" into your site, IE the images in your CSS and anything in your HTML/ERB/HAML views that are referenced by their file name as part of the web server itself. You don't have to do this, but one reason to do it is if there's any interruption of Amazon S3 or any kind of configuration issue etc at any point in the future these 'basic' visual resources won't be affected, so your site will still look pretty much intact.

Plus, this kind of content has a specific appropriate place to live (your public folder) and rails helpers that make it really easy to access.

I just can't see a reason to mess with S3 if it's not going to be high volume of data and bandwidth.

On the other hand, if it IS going to be very high bandwidth and you're using a cheap hosting platform that doesn't give you tons of bandwidth, moving those images to S3 would save you some. But are you really in danger of exceeding your bandwidth limits on the server?

Lastly, I think your OTHER app is using S3 as expected, that's a good use of S3. I would not necessarily recommend mixing buckets with other apps, though. The simplest reason for this is, let's say one of your apps grows and at some point merges with, partners with, or is sold to another party. Really, imagine any scenario where another interest becomes involved in either app.

Now you've got no way to maintain separation of access between the resources your two different apps are using. So you have to either migrate to a new platform for one of them, or you have to deal with them being 'joined at the hip' so to speak.

In other words, I just don't see an upside to sharing AWS resources between two apps that aren't directly related to each other. No reason to make them a package deal if they aren't naturally a package deal.

On the other hand if it DOES make sense for them to be totally linked, then it doesn't really matter either way.

Hope that helps you think about it. Good luck!

s3 is ridiculously cheap so I'd put any image uploads on there.

In the past I've put static images, stylesheets and javascripts and so forth on s3 but finally I just leave them on the web server. Reason for this is jammit which is oh sooo cool in handling packaging, updating, compressing, etc, etc of assets.