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I read Amazon s3: direct upload vs presigned url and was wondering when use a direct upload from the backend to s3 vs a presigned url.

  1. I understand that the direct upload requires extra bandwidth (user -> server -> s3) but I believe its more secure. Does the savings in bandwidth with the presigned url justify the slight drawback with security (i.e. with stuff like user messages)?

  2. I am also checking the file types on the backend (via magic numbers) which I think is incompatible with presigned urls. Should this reason alone result in not using urls?

  3. In addition I have a file size limit of 5 MB (not sure if this is considered large?). Would there be a significant difference in terms of performance and scalability (i.e. thousands to millions of files sent per hour) between using presigned urls vs direct upload.

josh
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1 Answers1

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You question sounds like you're asking for opinion, so, mine is as follows:

  1. It depends on how secure you need it to be and what you consider is safe. I was wondering about the same questions and I believe that in my case, in the end, it is all secured by SSL encryption anyway (which is enough for me), so I prefer to save my servers bandwidth and memory usage.

  2. Once more it depends on your own system requirements. Anyway, if any upload fails, S3 will be returning an error cause after the request failure. If checking file type is a MUST and checking it on your backend is the only way to do it, you already have your answer.

  3. In a scenario with millions of files (with close to 5MB each) being sent every hour, I would recommend direct upload, because that would be a lot of RAM usage to receive and resend every file.

There are a few more advantages of uploading directly to S3 as you can read here

lgdestro
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