Home / server / Questions / 217115
In Process
Tom
Asked: 2010-12-30 09:32:10 +0800 CST

Amazon S3: allow users to upload on a restricted basis (per bucket maybe)?

  • 772

I'm thinking about signing up to the Amazon S3 storage service.

What I want to do is create a service where other people can register their own bucket with a certain amount of storage.

These users will install my software, which then uploads their files. Of course, the users may only upload what they have paid for.

For this to work I would like to create a separate bucket for each customer, each with its own properties. Question 1: is this possible with the API? How?

This means that the installed software must have the rights needed to upload to my Amazon S3 account. Question 2: can I create individual authentication IDs for each bucket or customer, so that they can only upload with restrictions I have set?

Important info: I am a European resident and cannot do business in the United States, this means that I cannot use Amazon's DevPay service.

Update: looks like Amazon has a 100 buckets limit. This is not my service it seems. http://seocracy.com/2009/08/amazon-s3-bucket-limit/

Thanks in advance.

backup storage amazon-s3 amazon-web-services

1 Answers

  1. You can always hide the buckets behind a virtualization app (a HTTP front end, an FTP one, or something custom). But that means you would have to burn CPU, probably on an EC2 instance, to map these requests and copy bytes in/out of those S3 buckets.

    Exposing an S3 bucket directly to a user would have to follow the S3 security rules:

    How can I control access to my data stored on Amazon S3?
    Customers may use three mechanisms for controlling access to Amazon S3 resources: bucket policies, Access Control Lists (ACLs) and query string authentication. With bucket policies, companies can define rules which apply broadly across all requests to their Amazon S3 resources, such as granting write privileges to a subset of Amazon S3 resources. Customers can also restrict access based on an aspect of the request, such as HTTP referrer and IP address. With ACLs, customers can grant specific permissions (i.e. READ, WRITE, FULL_CONTROL) to specific users for an individual bucket or object. With query string authentication, customers can create a URL to an Amazon S3 object which is only valid for a limited time.

    • 1