Media optimisation - AWS web app

Question

I am in the process of building a web based application (Django, Angular on AWS). The application will be media heavy as in users will be uploading lots of images, videos and recordings.

Currently we are storing these in S3. Any thoughts on the best approach to 1. Minimize storage 2. Reduce data transfer 3. Not drastically impact the image/video quality.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Depending on media usage frequency you can use S3 life cycles to transfer files into low cost storage. For example, you can initially use S3 standard to serve files and then transfer them into S3 IA storage class followed by transferring to Glacier (Files which will not being used regularly). And if you are using reproducible content, consider using S3 RRS.

Image from Old S3 management console.

Make use of AWS CloudFront to cache content in edge locations.

And to improve uploads from different locations, consider using S3 Transfer Acceleration.

Also you can follow AWS reference architectures to get the best out of AWS services.

Reference architecture for media and content serving from AWS.

When it comes to the videos, you can use AWS Elastic Transcoder to encode your videos into different formats which will be best quality for different devices.