User AWS S3 bucket as "upload directory"

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1

Hello all

I am considerign using a AWS S3 bucket as the “upload” folder of our SuiteCRM system.

We have our SuiteCRM running over an Ubuntu AWS instance, and we have attached to our instance a AWS EBS Volume to act as external HDD to store the uploaded docs.

My idea, to continue saving costs, would be to mount the AWS S3 bucket in our instance in a directory that we will configure as upload directory in the config.php file of SuiteCRM.

I think thiks will be transparent to SuiteCRM as the Ubuntu SO will make this S3 Bucket, once attached and mounted over a virtual folder in Ubuntu, to work as a normal folder in the system, and as you can select the directory that will be your “upload” directory in the config.php… seems pretty easy theorically.

We have done this with AWS EBS Volume for years and works fine, however dont know if any of you has already tried this, and if we have any issue with performance??

Cheers

2

My experience of this approach (but on a CentOS 7 system), which I expect would apply equally to your setup:

  1. It works from a technological perspective.
  2. Unless you get very clever with your caching (which probably isn’t worth the effort), you’ll get a noticeable delay with images embedded in a page. i.e. the html loads, and then there is a noticeable delay as the html reorganises itself around the images as they load which is disturbing to me at least (due to web server having a longer latency for reading S3 objects than the html page that contains it. You will see what I mean if you try it with the company logo on the login page. Because you are planning on using it primarily to store uploaded docs, then this may be acceptable.
  3. You may have issues with additional requirements from your security team or data protection team depending on the legislative framework that you fall under.
  4. Remember that the more elements you use within your setup, the more there is to break, and reliability is important. Consider whether a couple of hours downtime (and people not being able to work), is worth the savings that you get.