Is Amazon S3 appropriate for serving videos?
amazon-s3, amazon-web-services
Solution
I cant imagine using Amazon for streaming. Honestly, their traffic costs are way too high for this kind of application. Anyway, if you still want to use it, S3 doesnt seem to be good option, because it's cluster storage designed for e.g. archiving and not streaming, it has limitations of number of requests per second as well it's concurrency. For streaming, you need the fastest possible storage, and any of the Amazon services is far away from that, definetely S3 and for EBS, it's not too fast either. You can consider servers with SSD drives and normal bandwidth prices. I have myself 10 streaming servers doing 100TB of traffic per day, each with 8x SSD drives and 10Gbps interface plus 64GB of RAM and 16 cores.
Problem
I'm working on a website with a primary function of playing videos, typically one right after another. Would it be appropriate to store the MP4 & WebW files on Amazon S3, then accomplish playback using HTML5/Flash? Are there any speed repercussions with serving videos via Amazon S3? Or would I be better off serving the videos from the same Amazon EC2 server I'm using to run the site? Really I'm looking for Pros/Cons. Thank you.