Deliver views from Amazon S3? Thoughts?

[eluser]Joël Cox[/eluser]
Hi John (Kevin),

Are you currently experiencing this kind of load on your DB? If not, leave it for later. Don't invest time on these things when you're not sure you will actually need them. Back to your proposed architecture, this system has few cons.

1) Slow. Compared to a local database, there is a lot of overhead. You first need to lookup the key in your database, make a request to S3, wait for it to return and decode the JSON.
2) Cost. For this kind of system, you look at almost twice the bandwidth costs, depending on your hosting provider. You have the incoming request from the client to your application, the request to S3, back to your application. Unless you host your platform within the AWS (let's say using EC2 or a third party) this can get quite costly.

When you really start running in to problems, I would start looking into a PHP cache, a document oriented database (I like MongoDB) or a front-end cache like Varnish.