Serving media from an S3 bucket

Amazon S3 is a reliable and secure cloud-based storage service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). We are going to configure our API to use S3 to store media files rather than maintaining them on a server physical disk.

Because S3 is a cloud-based solution there are a few advantages of using it over the local hard disk, one of which is having high scalability, as we are not going to be limited by the physical disk space. Another advantage is having better disaster recovery (DR) capability and availability. For example, with local disk storage, if the hard disk crashes, then our API users will not be able to access their files. However, the risk is much lower with Amazon S3.

Note

Creating an AWS account is beyond the scope of this book. We are going to assume that you already have your account up and ready. If you do not have an account, head to https://aws.amazon.com/free and create an account. AWS offers a free 1-year trial when you sign...