Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, secure, fast, inexpensive infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

hwdVideoShare and Amazon S3

hwdVideoShare includes support for Amazon S3 remote storage. You can serve your "local" video files directly from Amazon's servers, bypassing your servers. This significantly reduces site load and bandwidth consumption.

The feature works by moving your "local" video files to the Amazon S3 servers, and then loading the videos from Amazon instead of your own server.

Maintenance functions will work in the background to transfer all your videos to the Amazon S3 servers. This means that when you change the storage type in the General Settings, there is no need to manually transfer your videos, it will be done automatically in the background.

If a user watches a video that has not been transferred to the Amazon S3 server, then it will be loaded from your local server instead (until it has been transferred).

How does it work?

Once you have setup and selected the Amazon S3 plugin, hwdVideoShare will automatically attempt to load your videos from the Amazon S3 servers. Simple.

Uploads & Conversions

Users will still upload videos to your own server, and the video conversion will still occur on your server. Only after the video has been uploaded, and converted, will the video be automatically transferred to Amazon S3.

Enabling Amazon s3 in hwdVideoShare

Install & publish the Amazon S3 storage plugin

The Amazon S3 remote storage plugin is included in the hwdMediaShare package (plug_hwd_vs_storage_amazons3.tar.gz). You need to install this plugin in the Joomla installation tool. Once you have successfully installed the plugin then visit the Joomla plugin manager and make sure the plugin is published.

Setup your plugin parameters

You then need to setup the plugin parameters with the details of your Amazon S3 account and bucket.

Amazon S3 remote storage plugin parameters

• AWS Access Key - 20-character, alphanumeric sequence assigned to you when you created your AWS account, see how to get your AWS Access Identifiers
• AWS Secret Key - 40-character sequence, assigned to you when you created your AWS account, see how to get your AWS Access Identifiers
• AWS Bucket - The name of your file bucket (need to be unique across the Amazon system).

Select Amazon S3 as your storage solution

Go to your hwdVideoShare General Settings. Under the Setup tab, select "Amazon S3" as your remote storage solution.

Synchronising with Amazon S3 (under continued development)

Before hwdVideoShare can load your videos from Amazon S3 you much synchronise your hwdVideoShare video directory with your Amazon S3 bucket.

In the future, this synchronisation process will be automated in the maintenance however, in the meantime you will need to open this page: http://yourdomain.com/index.php?option=com_hwdvideoshare&maintenance=storage

Depending on the number and size of your videos this could take a long time and you might need to execute the page multiple times. The page should display messages explaining what is happening.

Scheduling Amazon S3 synchronization

The synchronization process can be run periodically as a cron job. For example to run the process every 30 minutes:

 */30 * * * * wget -q "http://yourdomain.com/index.php?option=com_hwdvideoshare&maintenance=storage"