File system storage

[ssherriff]

I'm fairly new to the Cloud to begin with, so I'm still trying to get my head around some of the more basic ideas. One of them being storing binary files.

I've signed up with Cloud Foundry and am trying to prepare my application so I can try deploying it to the Cloud. I'm a bit confused on how to deal with files though. I need to be able to upload images, sound, video, etc and I'd rather now store them as blobs in the database. Is this possible? And how would I go about doing this? If it isn't at the moment, is this on the timeline?

Cheers,
Stephanie

[dvolk]

Hello Stephanie,

We give you a set of virtual server with pre-configured software, and you're free to do anything you like with them. These virtual servers have everything regular servers do - operating system, file system, etc.

For the database we use MySQL. You can certainly store binary blobs in a MySQL database in a regular non-cloud environment, and you can do the same with CloudFoundry. It's up to the application developers. You don't need to put anything specific to CloudFoundry or the cloud into you applications.

Dmitriy

[ceracm]

Stephanie,

You might also want to consider storing the blobs in S3 and the associated metadata in the database. You could even hand out URLs that point directly back to S3. By doing this you would offload work to the scalable S3 infrastructure. See http://jets3t.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html for information on the excellent Jets3t library.

Chris

[ssherriff]

Ok, great, thank you both for your help.

Chris, that library you pointed me to looks fantastic. Thanks so much.

I only asked because I have also signed up for a beta account with Stax, and it seems it is similar, but really only allows you to deploy applications, and doesn't have the capability of using the actual file system underneath.

It looks like with Cloud Foundry I can just develop my application as I would normally, whereas Stax is a bit more restrictive.

By the way, above I realize I had a spelling mistake, and I meant that I'd rather NOT store my files as blobs in the database, but on the file system with only the meta data in the database. The information was still definitely helpful.

Cheers,
Stephanie