Here is the thing. Right now I have this e-commerce web site where people can send a lot of pictures for their products. All the images are stored at Amazon’s S3. When we need a thumbnail or something, I check over S3 if there is one available. If not, I process one and send it to S3 and display it on the browser. Every different sized thumbnail gets stored at S3, and checking the thumbnail availability at every request is kind of money consuming. I’m afraid I’ll pay a lot once the site starts to get more attention (if it gets…).
Thinking about alternatives, I was thinking on keeping only the original images at S3 and process the images on the fly at every request. I imagine that in that way I would by on CPU usage, but I hasn’t made any benchmarks to see how far can I go. The thing is that I wouldn’t expend money making requests and storing more images on S3 and I could cache everything on the user’s browser. I know it’s not that safe to do that, so that is why I’m bringing this question here.
What do you think? How do you think I could solve this?
Keep a local cache of:
Then in both circumstances you have a local reference. If the image isn’t in the local cache, you can check a local cache to see if it is in S3. Saves on S3 traffic for your most popular items and saves on latency when checking S3 for an item not in the local cache.