Selleo Labs spółka z o.o.

As a CTO I am responsible for making technology-related decisions, taking into consideration the specific business objectives. My goal is to facilitate the working process within a company by shaping a strategic plan tailored to the company culture. I closely cooperate with Product Owers and developers utilizing my expertise in narrow technical domains. 

Bartłomiej Wójtowicz

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This is a case study of how we managed to boost file uploads with Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration on one of our projects.

## Back story

First of all, let me start by introducing the problem we had. There’s an application where we **deploy PWAs for our clients from around the world**. Each PWA has the ability to take a picture and sent it to **Amazon S3** for further processing. Of course, while the image processes user has to wait for the response.

However, because we use **centralized S3** that is located in Europe (Ireland) our India-based users encountered some problems. They have to wait much longer for the upload to finish and this was our bottleneck.
After researching potential solutions we decided to use **Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration**.

## What is Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration?

**S3TA** allows its users to accelerate data or content uploads from all over the world to a **centralized S3 bucket**.

It accelerates transfers by automatically routing data to the closest AWS edge location by passing that data over AWS global backbone and by using Network Protocol Optimizations.

**S3 Transfer Acceleration** enables **fast, easy and secure transfers** of files over long distances between your client and S3 bucket. It can speed up content transfers by as much as 50-500%. The solution reduces the variability in Internet routing, speeds and congestion that affect the transfers.

### Common use cases

S3 Transfer Acceleration can be used in various cases, but the most common use cases are:

- customers with web and mobile applications that have an international user base to **speed up content upload or downloads**
- applications that have a lot of **user-generated content** that create PUTs to the S3 bucket
- customers with globally distributed offices and IT infrastructure that work with files, content and images locally to have an **S3 integrated application** push that data to a centralized S3 bucket

<Baner name={software-development} />

### Implementing the solution

Let’s move on to the process of implementing the solution. First of all, in order to introduce the changes to the application, we have to **configure S3 to work with Transfer Acceleration**. We can then replace all generated upload links from a region-based URL to an accelerated one, and it’s extremely easy to do so.

- we need to enable the acceleration status on S3; we use [Terraform](https://selleo.com/blog/terraform-vs-ansible) to manage our infrastructure so all we had to do was enable `acceleration_status` for our S3 resource: <https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/aws/r/s3_bucket.html#acceleration_status>
- before we upload the file we ask our server for a presigned upload URL so the PWA can upload the file. The generated URL contains the S3 region we operate in, by default: `s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/...`.

   To actually use Transfer Acceleration we have to switch from a regional bucket to `s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com`

For a more detailed process look into the documentation: <https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/transfer-acceleration.html>

## Conclusions

The entire process of migration to the production environment took place the day of implementation. It was fast, easy and generally pain-free. All the changes were transparent to the end-users.

Thanks to **S3 Transfer Acceleration** we were able to decrease the upload time significantly, so with little to no effort, we achieved a great success.

If you too have a problem with slow uploads or need help with AWS, feel free to [contact us](https://selleo.com/devops)!

This is a case study of how we managed to boost file uploads with Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration on one of our projects.

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