[SATLUG] Amazon S3

[aaron_satlug at clamp.net]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2007 at 11:55:13AM -0600, Sean Carolan wrote:
> Do any of you use the Amazon S3 service?  What options do they allow
> for accessing your share(s)?  Is it just FTP or can you use something
> more secure to move your files?

I use S3 quite a bit.  Some things to be aware of:

1) S3 does not expose a "file system" interface; it's a REST web
   service.  The namespace is (mostly) flat.  You have to create buckets
   and give the things thare you're uploading key names.

2) There are tools built on top of S3 that attempt to give it various
   different interfaces.  Some of them attempt to make it look something
   like a file system.  Some of them attempt to automatically back up a
   given set of files to it.  I am not terribly familiar with any of
   these offerings.

3) When you upload files to S3, you can specify whether you want them to
   be publically or privately accessible.  Publically accessible files
   will be available to anyone who gets a link to the file.  Privately
   accessible files will only be available if you have the private AWS
   account key that is associated (via public key) with the AWS account
   which owns the files.

4) When you upload files to S3, you can use HTTP or HTTPS.  HTTPS allows
   you push the data over the Internet without trusting the computers
   that it is routing through.

5) Unless you encrypt the data before pushing it to S3, Amazon.com will
   theoretically have access to the data, whether you use HTTPS or not.


Let me know if you have any further questions,
I'm actually a pretty heavy programmatic user of the S3 API,

Aaron