amazon s3

Hey gang.

For those of you interested, the presentation and the module are up on the workhabit site:

http://www.workhabit.org/s3saver-notes-sacramento-drupal-users-group

Alex has posted his presentation (open office format) and links from his Thursday talk on Amazon S3 services in his blog:

http://www.alexharford.com/2007/06/28/drupal-presentation/

It was a "crap happens" night so we didn't have a video projector or the audio equipment we typically have. The improvisation with the LCD monitor worked well for a video projector replacement. Using the camera microphone didn't produce as good a result. I'll leave it to Roland whether or not he wants to post the video link.

Amazon S3 - Storage for the Internet with Alex Harford.

Alex Harford will share his real world experience with Amazon S3 services.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

Boris had some thoughts on how it could be used with Drupal: Scalable static file hosting and some thoughts on Amazon S3.

We'll also be discussing some related Drupal modules and have a Drupal Q & A, so bring your questions on anything related to Drupal!

Date: Thursday June 28th, 6:30pm
Location: Bryght Offices, 1 Alexander Street, Suite 400 in Gastown. [Map] (Details below).

For those who don't need to leave right away there's typically a more social discussion at a local pub afterwards.

Has anyone made progress with a general integration with Amazon S3? I am interested in a summer of code project integrating S3 to serve static content and file uploads. Any thoughts?

Hello, I've recently submitted this patch for the backup module which allows automated regular backups of a Drupal installation to Amazon S3. It currently uses Geoffrey Gaudreault's Amazon S3 PHP class, which requires the Crypt_HMAC and (hacked) HTTP_Request PEAR modules, as well as forcing the site developer to alter some variables within the code of the class. I'm hoping the File API will offer a much easier way to integrate the backup.module with Amazon S3.

For those looking to have Drupal serve private files efficiently, I've posted a simple core patch that adds X-Sendfile support:
http://drupal.org/node/74472

So, one of the big things with static file serving is that it requires an entire Drupal bootstrap, which sucks up a lot of system resources. We have work to do in Drupal/the File API to support some interesting scalability options, remote files, etc. etc.

But, I think there are some interesting models for doing highly scalable static file serving outside of Drupal (and Amazon's S3 is cool).