Using Amazon S3 along with Amazon RDS

Question

I'm trying to host a database on Amazon RDS, and the actual content the database will store info on (videos) will be hosted on Amazon S3. I have some questions about this process I was hoping someone can help me with.

Can a database hosted on Amazon RDS interact (Search, update) something on Amazon S3? So if I have a database on Amazon RDS, and run a delete command to remove a specific video, is it possible to have that command remove the video on S3? Also, is there a tutorial on how to make the two mediums interact?

Thanks very much!

Answer 1

You will need an intermediary scripting language to maintain this process. For instance, if you're building a web based application that stores videos on S3 and the info for these videos including their locations on RDS you could write a PHP application (hosted on an EC2 instance, or elsewhere outside of Amazon's cloud) that connects to the MySQL database on RDS and does the appropriate queries and then interacts with Amazon S3 to complete a certain task there (e.g. delete a video like you stated).

To do this you would use the Amazon AWS SDK, for PHP the link is: http://aws.amazon.com/php/

You can use Java, Ruby, Python, .NET/Windows, and mobile SDKs to do these various tasks on S3, as well as control other areas of AWS if you use them.

You can instead find third-party scripts that do what you want and build an application around them, like for example, if someone wrote a simpler S3 interaction class you could use instead of rewriting some of your own code.

For a couple command line applications I've built I have used this handy and free tool: http://s3tools.org/s3cmd which is basically a command line tool for interacting with S3. Very useful for bash scripts.

Tyler