I am new to AWS services, so forgive the simple question:
I'm building an iOS app that is currently using RDS and EC2 instances. I now want to store photos and audio files in an S3 bucket. I know there is an iOS SDK which makes it easy to download from and upload to an S3 bucket directly from the iOS side. However, should I also be using Cloudfront to decrease latency in addition? What's the best way to go about this?
I recently built an app that moved photos back and forth between S3. I looked into using Amazon's SDK but it was just too bulky.
Instead I used Matt Thompson's AFAmazonS3Manager.
Worth looking into if you are building an app with AWS.
Well, it depends. You should use cloudfront if you need to reduce latency, and especially if your users a spread out all over the globe - cloudfront will help with that.
On the otherhand, there is an extra cost in using it (sometimes substantial), so if you are not having a latency problem, why bother?
If you decide you need cloudfront, it is extraordinarily easy to add in.
Related
I'm making a Rails App, which I need to be online, but probably 1 or 2 people will use it at most. The app will organize photos + description uploaded by this user. The photos are aprox. 2 GB. I don't want to spend a lot of money on this, so my question is what is the best solution here? I hear Heroku is free but I can't upload photos in my App on Heroku and S3 costs money. Any advice would be appreciated.
host
You can go with heroku, free plan should be enough for 2-5 person.
image storage
As you mentioned about S3 is not free or cheap, best solution is alternate of S3 is Cloudinary. It will allow you to upload around 5-7GB of data including bandwidth, and super fast.
Cloudinary Link
Alternates: Google Drive, Dropbox, Pcloud and etc... These all cloud storages maybe little slow in uploading or fetching but still free solution...
Background - My app is related to Chef where people will post pics and videos. These numbers would be huge.
Tech stack - RoR, nginx, Postgresql, AWS.
My question :
Since there would be lot of files, what would be the suggestion. Should I use s3 to store the images. Have CDN implemented?
I would be tagging the files so that they would be searched on those tags. What is the best way to store the tags?
Load Balancing?
I was looking at how FB is storing the images and videos. Not sure if I have to do it because mine is a small app.
P.S - I have already done the MVP with basic s3 setup but there are performance issues.
I was wondering to use another DB since images and videos are unstructured. (Correct me if I am wrong)
I am posting this because I have an actual working problem.
This is a vast question, and answers may vary depending on different opinions and experiences. But On the lines that you are thinking, AWS S3 is a good option to manage files, especially media. You can also search through s3, and associate meta information with files which you might want to call tags. To Scale it more for reads, you can also setup elastic search or opensearch server to index the image distributions in s3. The best way is indeed indexing, whatever tools or platforms you use. But Using indexing cant be achieved always, due to project constraints including costs. Infact you might not even want CDN because S3 is itelf geographically distributed in wider regions and you can leverage that.
Edit---------
Yes, you index the stored images information. You can set up elastic search server whose index will always be updated. If you are not keen on investing in elasticsearch, you can setup a simple database of your choice without worrying future's future's issues. May be you can setup NoSQL (DynamoDB AWS). On every store in s3, create a trigger to update the DynamoDB with its information storing tags and other meta information. You can retrieve that information and display image from s3 URI stored in that DynamoDB map.
My team and I are building an iOS application. We allow technicians in the field to upload images for certain issues they are resolving on technical equipment. It will be important to zoom in (so keep quality relatively high) when these images are uploaded to S3.
Recently we decided to add thumbnails because it will be much faster when others browse the iOS app, rather than downloading a 1.5-2.5mb image.
My co-worker decided the best way to handle this is to generate a 200-500kb thumbnail in iOS then upload the image and the thumbnail to s3.
I voiced my concern that some of our technicians may be in some parts of the world where internet is slow and data usage is limited. So doing all this additional work on the device and uploading makes no sense to me. However the team considers this a good solution and will move forward. I've shown them easy examples of how to generate thumbnails from S3 and Lambda automatically on the server... allowing us to either upload higher fidelity images with the additional bandwith or just increase the speed of the app by uploading much less. Sometimes a user may upload as many as 100 images... meaning an additional 20-50mb...
Anyways I wanted to hear some answers about how you guys think the best way to handle this is, mainly for my own sanity check.
I don't completely comprehend the intricacies of your project, but from experience, I have one word for you - Cloudinary. As opposed to S3, which a general purpose Cloud storage solution, cloudinary is designed to handle images.
We have a 200,000 hits a day online classified app that handles tens of thousands of photos daily. And cloudinary provides an extremely mean solution for all our needs. We have uploads by users from their mobile and desktop devices, bookmarking of those images, CDN based serving, and thumbnail generation.
Did I mention they have thumbnail generation built in? They have lots of other features as well, including
Resize and Crop
Optimized JPEG Custom Crop
Face Thumbnail
Rotated Circular Thumbnail
Zoom Effects and Zoom Image Overlay
Watermark Image
Optimized WebP
Overlay, Border, Shadow Text Overlay, Border, Shadow etc.
The admin console is pretty kickass too, with all of the above features available for you to configure over the cloud. And it fits well with pretty much any application (we use it in our internal Ruby, Go, NodeJS services, our Web Application and our iOS and Android apps as well).
I'm not paid to sell Cloudinary to you, but I can vouch that if it is image based services I needed, I would go for Cloudinary any day over S3. Major players like EBay and TED etc. use it for their image requirements.
I am currently trying to build a chat application in swift whilst using Firebase for real-time messaging. My only issue is I want users to send images, I want them to have profiles with images but I know Firebase has limited storage (or at least storage per pay tier is low for the number of connections you get)
So I would like to know how to connect up another database and make calls when needed between the two. So when and image is sent in a message, rather than Firebase storing the image, it stores a URL to the image in the other database.
I am under the impression something like AWS S3 is my best bet. any help is appreciated!
This question has been asked before and there are a number of solutions. It's kind of an 'opinion' type question but here are a few options.
View and store images in Firebase
Firebase has a 10Mb capacity, which is adequate for many images. However, if you need larger, they can be easily encoded as base64 and split into chunks.
If you want to go external:
s3 or Filepicker (Filestack) as well as Google provide some options.
Not sure of the overall requirements but obviously you can dig into CloudKit / CoreData and even Dropbox offers an API.
I have zero experience with Box but it may be an option as well.
Each option has it's own API.
In general, you would store a link in a firebase node to the image/object in question. However, the mechanics of that vary wildly as interfacing with CloudKit/CoreData will be different than say Filepicker.
With CoreData you will have to roll your own reference scheme whereas Filepicker you can have an almost direct reference to the file.
Many of these services provide a free or low cost tryouts and you can whip some code up in a manner of a few minutes to test out the functionality to see if it may meet your requirement.
If you need help encoding/decoding, see the answer to this question
Swift2 retrieving images from Firebase
Once you get rolling, if you have issues post some code in another question.
I've recently submitted my iOS Quiz app to Apple but noticed that the file size for the app is pretty big (about 150 MB). Users would need to be connected to wifi in order to download it per Apple's rules. My quiz app is set up so users are given 4 choices and shown an image and must guess the correct answer from the image shown to them. How would I minimize the file size for my app so that it isn't so large? Is there a way I can host the images on a server without losing the functionality of my app? I heard of something like Backend Services but know nothing about it. If anyone can guide me in the right direction that would be awesome, thanks!
You can check out a free back end service like Parse, it could do the trick for you, especially because you dont have a lot (besides images I guess) that'll be on the server side.
This also helped me start with using it.
Good luck :)
I'm assuming you have all the quiz data (questions and images) within your app bundle?
You can shrink it next to nothing if you move all your questions and images to a backend server and serve the questions and images (links) using simple JSON Structure.
You can build your own backend (Java/PHP/etc..) or look into using Parse.
use JPEG images whenever possible. PNGs costs more space. Do not place jpeg to xcassets, since they will be converted to PNGs. If your pictures should be transparent - it is better to use Webp or JPNG format.
You may use CloudKit to host your data in a public database. You won't need any backend knowledge to do that. This tutorial will help you understand the basics. WWDC videos covers some more, i suggest you to look at WWDC 2014, Introducing CloudKit and WWDC 2015, CloudKit Tips and Tricks.