I’ve been using Amazon S3 as a CDN for the LVFS metadata for a few weeks now. It’s been working really well and we’ve shifted a huge number of files in that time already. One thing that made me very anxious was the bill that I was going to get sent by Amazon, as it’s kinda hard to work out the total when you’re serving cough millions of small files rather than a few large files to a few people. I also needed to keep track of which files were being downloaded for various reasons and the Amazon tools make this needlessly tricky.
I signed up for the free trial of S3stat and so far I’ve been pleasantly surprised. It seems to do a really good job of graphing the spend per day and also allowing me to drill down into any areas that need attention, e.g. looking at the list of 404 codes various people are causing. It was fairly easy to set up, although did take a couple of days to start processing logs (which is all explained in the set up). Amazon really should be providing something similar.
For people providing less than 200,000 hits per day it’s only $10, which seems pretty reasonable. For my use case (bazillions of small files) it rises to a little-harder-to-justify $50/month.
I can’t justify the $50/month for the LVFS, but luckily for me they have a Cheap Bastard Plan (their words, not mine!) which swaps a bit of advertising for a free unlimited license. Sounds like a fair swap, and means it’s available for a lot of projects where $600/yr is better spent elsewhere.
