I made my own S3 as well. I used two S3-compatible services before but there was always some issue(first one failed to upload certain file, no matter what and support was unhelpful; second one did not migrate with file metadata properly so i knew this would be ongoing problem). In the end, it is just a dumb file store, nothing else. All you need to do is to write a basic HTTPS API layer and some logic to handle database for the file metadata and possibly location. That is about it. Takes a few days with testing.
But then you also have to think about file uploads and file downloads. You cannot have a single server fulfilling all the roles, otherwise you have a bottleneck.
So this file storage became a private backend service that end-users never access directly. I have added upload services, whose sole purpose is to allow users to upload files and only then upload them to this central file store, essentially creating a distributed file upload queue(there is also a bit more logic regarding file id creation and validation).
Secondly, own CDN was needed for downloads. But only because I use custom access handling and could not have used any of the commercial services(though they do support access via tokens, it just was not working for me). This was tricky because I wanted for the nodes to distribute files between themselves and not always fetch them from the origin to avoid network costs on the origin server. So they had to find each other, talk to each other and know who has which file.
In short, rolling your own is not as hard as it might seem and should be preferable. Maybe to save time, use cloud at the beginning, but once you are up and running and your business idea is validated by having customer, immediately move to your own infra in order to avoid astronomical costs of cloud services.
btw, i also do video processing like mentioned in the blog post :)
But then you also have to think about file uploads and file downloads. You cannot have a single server fulfilling all the roles, otherwise you have a bottleneck.
So this file storage became a private backend service that end-users never access directly. I have added upload services, whose sole purpose is to allow users to upload files and only then upload them to this central file store, essentially creating a distributed file upload queue(there is also a bit more logic regarding file id creation and validation).
Secondly, own CDN was needed for downloads. But only because I use custom access handling and could not have used any of the commercial services(though they do support access via tokens, it just was not working for me). This was tricky because I wanted for the nodes to distribute files between themselves and not always fetch them from the origin to avoid network costs on the origin server. So they had to find each other, talk to each other and know who has which file.
In short, rolling your own is not as hard as it might seem and should be preferable. Maybe to save time, use cloud at the beginning, but once you are up and running and your business idea is validated by having customer, immediately move to your own infra in order to avoid astronomical costs of cloud services.
btw, i also do video processing like mentioned in the blog post :)