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From: Mark Hahn <mark@hahnca.com>
Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:48:02 -0800
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Subject: couch attachments versus amazon S3
To: couchdb-user@apache.org
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I've been storing a lot of images as couch attachments.  I now have to
support videos that are too large for couch attachments.  So I pretty much
have to consider using S3 since I'm on AWS anyway and S3 scales
automatically compared to my OS file system.

Since I have to use S3 for videos, why not use it for images?  Has anyone
else compared these alternatives?

These are the consequences to switching to S3 that I can think of ...

1) Smaller load on couchdb for replicating, compaction, disk usage etc

2) S3 would give less load on cpu and nginx for serving files to client

3) Performance for file access?  Would S3 be slower?

4) Option to use CDN in the future?

5) S3 has finer-grained access control than attachments.  I can't let the
client directly access couch on my server because couch has no read-access
controls.

6) Do small files have a disadvantage in S3?  I see they charge for IO
transfers, whatever that means.

After typing this in I'm starting to think that if a file is needed across
servers, no matter how small, it should be in S3 instead of an attachment.

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