Amazon S3 for your data storage using Coldfusion and Java

I recently had the chance to work with Amazon's S3 services. If you don't know what S3 stands for, neither did I 4 weeks ago.. it stand for Simple Storage Solution, and it's Amazon's answer to Google but for a really tiny price (at least there is some kind of comparison there since both Google and Amazon offer all this "space"). I don't think that the difference in Google and Amazon have anything to do with price though, and this S3 system is really slick as are most of the Google products. The S3 is especially convenient though if you are storing large files, and large amounts of large files at that. Put your gigabyte's worth of images on the web now, because you can finally afford a host that will give you that much space at an affordable price.

Check out the pricing HERE.

As a Coldfusion and Java developer RIAForge has a great CFC to get you started. But to go a little deeper you might want to try the AWS SDK for Java, which you can fine HERE. Place the .jar file into the appropriate Coldfusion directory on the server, or ask your host to do it for you if you don't have control of the server. Now you can use the Amazon S3 services with the AWS SDK for Java API through Coldfusion by instantiating the Java object, and using the methods available to leverage S3 in a variety of ways.

In conclusion to keep it rather short (there's really a lot to talk about here if you think about it from a business standpoint), if you are in business and you pay for data storage even if it is just for a static website and email, you might be paying too much. Not only will you save money with S3 services, you will also have a reliable service and I think it's safe to say you won't "lose" your data by storing it with Amazon. An inexpensive content delivery network that is reliable and easy to use.