High availability storage

Let's suppose we have a site, dynamic or static, that serves large files such as video files. The best approach to handling this situation would be to host the web server, as any web application with the HTTP server serving the HTML content directly will not have the large files on the server itself.

With this method, we could use any deployment method for getting the code from source control into the server and not have to worry about maintaining the other files. Failover on the instance can be taken care of as it would for any instance, through load balancers and auto scaling groups. Redundancy of the files outside of source control might be controlled through an AWS-provided service such as S3. Remember that with S3, redundancy, encryption, and failover are taken care of with no intervention or set up required.

As a bit of coverage, let's discuss S3 a bit more in detail. AWS' Simple Storage Service provides an unlimited amount of object storage...