This answers the question of, "How To Use Articulate with Amazon S3". Let us explain.
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How To Use Articulate With Amazon S3
Introduction
What do Articulate and Amazon have in common? They are at the top of their fields; Articulate is the market leader in rapid e-learning software and Amazon is a market leader of e-commerce worldwide.
Who are Pat & Lorna Shanks? We are the co-founders of SpectacularPresentations.com, a company that creates Articulate presentations for direct marketers whose content is currently in audio and text format.
We noticed a few months ago that we were approaching our bandwidth limits on some of our hosting accounts. So we searched for a service that was scalable, reliable and would grow as we grew our business, without having to invest in hardware and networking infrastructure beforehand. We have chosen to use Amazon S3. This will allow us to continue to grow our business without the extra costs of prepaying for the network infrastructure. It’s basically a pay-as-you-grow scenario, which is great for us as owners of a growing business.
Background
Let’s start with some background... Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an online storage web service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon claims that S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its own global e-commerce network. S3’s design aims to provide scalability, high availability and low latency at commodity costs. Amazon has charged end users $0.15 per gigabyte-month, with additional charges for bandwidth used in sending and receiving data (see Figure 1).
There are a couple of caveats with S3:
- It is not really designed to be a web server. There is no default page as there are for web servers.
- There are no guarantees that customer data will not be lost.
Amazon S3 bandwidth is already very inexpensive and unlimited, and what is also very interesting to know is that Amazon will be introducing new pricing plans with lower storage prices effective November 1st 2008.
Figure 1 – Amazon S3 Pricing
Amazon S3 Basics
Brief introduction:
Amazon S3 is a web service that allows developers to gain access to highly scalable, very reliable, and inexpensive storage space. Amazon S3 is highly economical because you pay only for what you use. Data is replicated to multiple servers at multiple data centers.
Objects
Files or data that you want to store on Amazon S3 are called “Objects”. Once an object is stored in S3, it will contain: (1) contents of the file, and (2) the given amount of meta-data. The given object can be from 1byte to 5GB.
Buckets
“Buckets” provide unique namespaces for management of objects contained in the bucket. Bucket namespaces are global across all of S3. An S3 account is allowed 100 buckets.
Keys
A “Key” is a unique identifier for an object within a bucket.
Authentication
Amazon S3 “Authentication” ensures that nobody else sees your private data.
- Access Key ID: Access Key ID is a unique identifier that tells S3 to target a specific user account.
- Secret Access Key: Secret Access Key is used to access control on the given Access Key ID. You can grant various access models for an object or an entire bucket:
o private
o public-read
o public-read-write
o authenticated-read
Secret Access Key tells S3 what type of access control you have on any given Access Key ID.
Steps for new Amazon S3 Users
1. You first need to have your own Amazon S3 Account.
2. You will need a way to create/manage Amazon S3 buckets and upload objects, so you'll need to install a client on your PC (FTP does not work).
There are two clients that we have used, one is FREE the other is FEE based.
A. S3 Organizer add-on for the Firefox web browser is a free, less-featured alternative (see Figure 2).
B. Bucket Explorer, is a fee-based, full-featured and easy to use client that runs on Windows, Linux and Mac (see Figure 3).
We use both for various needs and requirements, as both have small bugs or inconsistencies when working on our Amazon S3 account.
Figure 2 - S3 Organizer add-on for Firefox
Figure 3 - Bucket Explorer
3. Install your application of choice, but we would recommend installing both:
Firefox (see Figure 2)
- Open Firefox and go to Tools menu -> S3 Organizer, and click Manage Accounts button
Bucket Explorer (see Figure 3)
- Open Bucket Explorer
4. Obtain your Amazon AWS Access Key ID and Secret Access Key and enter them into each application.
- These are available by logging into your Amazon AWS account http://aws.amazon.com, mousing-over “Your Account” (see Figure 4) in the upper right-hand corner, and selecting “Access Identifiers” (see Figure 5)
- Ours have been covered up for security purposes, but you can see where they are located for your use.
Figure 4 – Amazon AWS Account
Figure 5 – Access Identifiers
Bucket Names
Buckets provide unique namespaces for management of objects contained in the bucket. So you can think of buckets as the highest folders at the root of your S3 account. Bucket namespaces are global across all of S3. An S3 account is allowed 100 buckets.
Bucket names and keys are chosen so that objects are addressable using HTTP URLs.
S3 Default Access
The default access to your files is based on a Domain/Bucket/Key combination.
- http://ping.fm/TBECu
- http://ping.fm/Zz1W0
- http://bucket/key
(where bucket is a DNS CNAME record pointing to http://s3.amazonaws.com)
[Note: We will not cover in this article how to setup a DNS CNAME alias as a sub- domain to an Amazon S3 bucket. If there are enough requests we will do an article on that separate topic – P & L]
Example Using Our Own Bucket and Key
Our bucket name is s3.2yourvideo.com (case is very important – always use lower case for bucket names)
Our key name (folder) is 409622
Our Live Articulate Presentation Example
- http://ping.fm/6dhSi/s3.2yourvideo.com/409622/player.html
- http://ping.fm/2bIku/player.html
- http://ping.fm/aiJHC/player.html
What We Provide to Our Customers (which we use for tracking purposes)
Figure 6 – S3 Organizer with Bucket = s3.2yourvideo.com, Key = 409622
How to Setup an Articulate Presentation to Work from Amazon S3
We have now given you a good understanding of what Amazon S3 is, why we are using it for our business requirements and some basic S3 terminology. We have also recommended some client software on a PC that will allow you to work with buckets and folders (keys) and allow you to move your Articulate published objects to Amazon S3.
For this example of moving the Articulate published objects to Amazon S3 we will use Firefox and the S3 Organizer add-on.
1. Start Firefox (see Figure 7)
- Open Firefox and go to Tools menu -> S3 Organizer
Figure 7 – Firefox and starting S3 Organizer
2. Select the “bucket” that you want to use (see Figure 8)
- For this example we are using s3.2yourvideo.com
Figure 8 – Select the “bucket”
3. Create a new folder (“key”) (see Figure 9)
- Select the “Create New Folder” icon
- Enter the name of the folder ”key” you want to use (eg. 409654)
- Select “Ok”
Figure 9 – Create a new folder (“key”)
4. Upload your Articulate Presentation to Amazon S3 (Figure 10)
- Select the Folder you want to upload from your hard drive. Then select the objects that you wish to upload (this should be the published folder from Articulate).
- Select the folder “key” that you want to upload your Articulate Presentation into.
- Select the blue arrow pointing right to move the objects to Amazon S3.
- It will take a couple of minutes as the objects are uploaded to Amazon S3.
Figure 10 – Upload your Articulate Presentation to Amazon S3
5. After the upload, the objects are now located on Amazon S3 (see Figure 11)
Figure 11 – Objects located on Amazon S3
6. Return to the folder (key) level in Amazon S3 (see Figure 12)
- Select the “Folder” that you just uploaded the objects to
- Right click and select “Edit ACL” (ACL = Access Control List)
Figure 12 – Selecting Folder to “Edit ACL”
7. Edit ACL [Access Control List] (see Figure 13A & 13B)
Figure 13A – Before Any Selection (default setting)
Figure 13B – After Making Selections
8. We’re done!
Notes: On ACL (Access Control List) or Permissions
You'll need to set permissions on your bucket, folders and the files within using your favorite bucket management tool.
We recommend setting the Bucket permission to "full control by owner, read access for everyone" and setting the permissions of the Folders/Files within the Bucket to "full control by owner, read access for everyone". This will prevent people from being able to browse/list the files in your bucket.
How Articulate Looks Running From Amazon S3
So what does Articulate running from Amazon S3 look like? We invite you to visit http://ping.fm/ZXLs0 (or click on Figure 14 below) to view an Articulate Presentation working from Amazon S3.
Figure 14 – Articulate Presenter running from Amazon S3
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Can you tell the difference running from Amazon S3?
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