Question

What would be a scalable file upload/download system/database?

I’m building a website where users can login, upload images that are private, but truly private. I can’t upload them to a map on the harddisk of a server, since that would not scale (what happend if we add more servers?) and it wouldn’t be private since everyone could go:

http://127.372.171.33/images/private_picture.png

and download the file.

I am building the project in Play Framework (scala/java)

How do websites like flickr handle these kind of things? Do they put them in a database? And what kind of database would be suitable for this situation?

Thanks for help

Answer 1

I can’t tell you how those big sites handle it but putting those images into a database might be one way.

Another way would be to put the files into a virtual filesystem that spans a cluster of servers or distribute them onto different servers and just don’t make the directories that contain the images visible to the webserver. Thus nobody should be able to open the image just using the server and the path on that server.

To actually deliver the images you could them implement some streaming service that sends a bytestream to the browser for display (like the webservers would do as well). This service could first check the download permissions for the requested image.