cloud storage

In the first half of my CDN blog , I talked a little about why I wanted to move my biggest website to leverage cloud delivery of content, and the broad strokes of how I planned to get started. This second half details more of the specifics of how I technically achieved the early days of that transition.

In my day job, we've been steadily moving into the cloud for a while now for all the same reasons everyone else does: it gives us less to maintain ourselves in terms of hardware, it allows us to distribute worldwide more efficiently, it saves us money in the long run, and so on. At home, though, it's a different story, though most of the goals are similar. So now that I have some working knowledge of using Amazon Web Services to create a content delivery network (more commonly known as CDN), I decided it was time to apply it to my largest and oldest hobby site too.

I'm more of a consumer of the internet than most, I suspect. My entire family loves Netflix, from Futurama to Curious George to my wife suddenly becoming enamored of Scandal, God love her. I work from home a few days a week, and as a UX engineer, that often entails transfer of dozens and dozens of files a day, often hundred-megabyte PSDs and other big ol' things. I also upload pretty sizable photos and videos of my daughter fairly frequently, because as long as I'm paying Google for extended storage on her account, I might as well fill it up.

To finish/start the year, I picked up a...