S3 is Sweet (One App Down)

This weekend I ported my big filesystem-based app to S3, and it went like a dream. It's a image-management application, with all the actual images stored on disk. In addition to the standard import/edit/delete, the app provides automatic on-the-fly thumbnail generation, along with primitive editing capabilities (crop, resize, rotate, etc.). With images on local disk, that's all really easy: read them in, do whatever, write them back out. I figured using S3 would make things both more cumbersome and less performant. Both suspicions turned out to be unwarranted.

Building on the 's3Url' UDF that I published last week, I whipped up a little CFC to manage file storage on S3 with a very simple API. It has s3Url, putFileOnS3, getFileFromS3, s3FileExists, and deleteS3File methods, which all do about what you'd expect. You can grab the code here: amazons3.cfc.txt (make sure you remove the ".txt" extension) or visit the project page. It uses the simple HTTP-based interface, so after the authentication is handled, it's all very simple and fast. I haven't looked at the SOAP interface – why bother complicating a simple task?

With that CFC (and an application-specific wrapper to take care of some path-related transforms), porting the whole app took about two hours. I also realized after I was mostly done that the CF image tools accept URLs as well as files, so I switched my image reads to just use URLs instead of pulling the file local and reading it from disk.

As for moving all the actual content, S3Sync was a champ, moving about 4.5GB of data from my Cari server to S3 in a few hours, including gracefully handling a couple errors raised by S3 (which a retry – performed automatically – solved), and a stop/restart in the middle. Total cost: about 65 cents.

Next is porting the blogs, including all the Picasa-based galleries. Unfortunately, that means writing PHP, but with how easy the CF stuff was, I don't think it'll be too much effort.