Amazon online storage

Getting started
The first step to hosting your media files on S3 is to sign up for a free Amazon Web Services account at http://tinyurl.com/2o4gqk. You can then sign up for S3 and generate your access keys.

The next step is to upload your files to S3. One approach is to write your own tools to do this. You’ll find support is rather thin on the ground. For a simple PHP script take a look at http://tinyurl.com/yvv58g. For this to work you’ll need Geoff Gaudreault’s S3 class from http://tinyurl.com/2bn5xj.

For an alternative method using Python take a look at Adrian Holovaty’s blog (http://tinyurl.com/ysnfoy), which uses Amazon’s free Python S3 library for Rest (http://tinyurl.com/2erfx2).

S3 applications
Until quite recently the DIY method was about the only way to upload files to S3, but developers have not been slow to spot the potential of cheap online storage and what was a trickle of S3-based utilities has now become a fast-flowing stream.

The best place to look for these is Amazon’s AWS Solutions catalogue at http://tinyurl.com/3dtq2j. These are developers that use S3 as the basis for providing value-added services such as online backup, enhanced email or photo backup and sharing websites. There’s also a smattering of file housekeeping utilities for S3 account holders.

S3Fox Organizer (www.rjonna.com/ext/s3fox.php) is a freeware Firefox extension that manages files in your S3 account using an FTP-style interface that lists local folders in a left-hand panel and S3 buckets and objects in a right-hand panel. It’s simple to install and it allows you to modify access permissions easily.

S3 Drive is a windows program that lets you access the S3 space as if it were a local network drive. Because S3 Drive looks like a local network drive you can use it with your existing applications. The program is in beta and requires Microsoft .Net version 2 and an S3 account. It runs on Windows 2000 and all versions of XP but hasn’t been tested on Vista.

If you want to upload files using an FTP client on a Mac take a look at Interarchy, an FTP client that allows you to connect to S3 and transfer files in almost exactly the same fashion as with a conventional web server. As S3 has no concept of directories, Interarchy simulates them. A single user licence for Interarchy 8 is $59.95 (about £30).

Who’s using S3?
You don’t need an S3 account to take advantage of S3 storage. Utilities that provide access to your S3 account are in the minority; most of the development effort seems to be focused on producing services which leverage the benefits of S3 to provide a consumer product. Many are backup services, but collaborative working environments and media-based social networking sites are also bringing S3 to the masses.

The family-run photo-sharing site Smugmug prides itself on offering unlimited free photo-sharing space with no ads. A lot of people found this attractive and by early 2006 it was in need of more space to store its rapidly growing collection of more than half a billion photos.

Smugmug decided to store all its new images using S3, since when it has added more than 10TB of photos a month. At those volumes Smugmug’s S3 bill must be lengthy, but, according to Amazon, Smugmug “figures it has saved roughly $500,000 (about £254,000) in storage expenditures and cut its disk storage array costs in half”.

Altexa.com specialises in online data backup. Altexa Backup runs on Windows and consists of three modules that handle backup configuration, management and restoration. Altexa charges $1.50 (about 75p) a month for 1GB and $15 (about £7.50) a month for 10GB, with a free 30-day trial.

Altexa replaced its in-house storage with Amazon S3. For Altexa CEO Mark Walker, the low cost of S3 compared with conventional ISP hosting packages was a key factor. “No company offers data storage at a price as low as Amazon,” said Walker.

Other Amazon web services
Amazon offers a range of novel web services in addition to S3. Here’s a brief tour around the top ones.

Elastic Compute Cloud - Amazon’s ‘Elastic Compute Cloud’ (EC2) is to processing what S3 is to storage – scalable computing capacity provided on a pay-per-use basis. Hiring out CPU time isn’t a new idea – Sun, HP and IBM are all doing it – but EC2 lowers the bar in terms of cost, accessibility and scalability.

Mechanical Turk - Amazon Mechanical Turk is a web-based application, currently in beta, that co-ordinates programming tasks with human intelligence to solve problems that computers can’t do on their own. Requesters compose Human Intelligence Tasks (Hits), which are completed by Providers. A Hit might involve identifying objects in photos, writing trivia questions or transcribing audio. Payment for satisfactorily completed Hits is made to the provider’s Amazon account. The name of the application is derived from ‘The Turk’, an 18th-century chess-playing automaton.

E-Commerce - Amazon’s E-Commerce Service (ECS) enables web developers to access Amazon’s product catalogue and other information and add Amazon.com shopping cart functionality to their own sites.

Alexa - The Alexa website provides a search engine, an Open Directory-based web directory and web traffic information based on data collected from users of the Alexa toolbar. Alexa Web Services provides access to the Alexa data and search engine for web application developers.