Chapter 7. Storing Data on S3

In the previous chapter, we stored data about our songs collection on SimpleDB. But where are the actual MP3 files for these songs? They are stored locally on your hard drive. Wouldn't it be nice if we stored those on the cloud too? We cannot store them in SimpleDB, as it is not made for storing large binary files. However, Amazon does provide another web service that is perfect for storing files— the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). In this chapter, we are going to learn how to store the metadata about our songs collection on SimpleDB, while storing the actual song files on S3. We will also cover:

• Learn about S3 buckets

• Create an S3 bucket for storing our songs

• Add metadata about the songs to SimpleDB

• Store the actual song files on S3

• Back up SimpleDB domains to S3