Scalable Image Storage

Question

I\'m currently designing an architecture for a web-based application that should also provide some kind of image storage. Users will be able to upload photos as one of the k

Answer 1

Have you considered Amazon Web Services? S3 is web-based file storage, and SimpleDB is a key->attribute store. Both are performant and highly scalable. It's more expensive than maintaining your own servers and setups (assuming you are going to do it yourself and not hire people), but you get up and running much more quickly.

Edit: I take that back - its more expensive in the long run at high volumes, but for low volume it beats the initial cost of buying hardware.

S3: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ (you could store your image files here, and for performance maybe have an image cache on your server, or maybe not)

SimpleDB: http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ (metadata could go here: image id mapping to whatever data you want to store)

Edit 2: I didn't even know about this, but there is a new web service called Amazon CloudFront (http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/). It is for fast web content delivery, and it integrates well with S3. Kind of like Akamai for your images. You could use this instead of the image cache.