My company is using AEM 6.5 and we were thinking to get some better performance out of our systems. The idea we had is to upload only some assets (for example videos) to an S3 bucket and keep the other assets locally, we do not want to upload all the assets/datastore to S3. I know I can switch the datastore to S3, but that would mean all the assets go to S3, and we don't want this.
Restriction: we want the video upload to be done seamlessly from within the AEM Author, the editor should upload the video normally and somehow, behind the scenes, this transition to S3 to happen.
I checked as much documentation as I could find, and there is no mention of this partial asset upload to S3, you either go full S3 or nothing at all (we already tested full S3 datastore, it's working, but we do not want it).
So, my question is: did someone manage to do something like this?
Thanks
Technically, it is possible to upload assets to S3, when they are uploaded to AEM instead of storing them in JCR. Nevertheless, this probably won't work as you expect and would require a lot of refactoring of AEM itself to make it work properly.
Just because the binary is stored in S3, does not mean that AEMs internals are aware of that and can deal with it.
Take asset preview on the author for example: this part of AEM would expect the binary to be stored in JCR. Now you have to rewrite this whole part of AEM to go look for those assets in S3. This would be a massive headache, overlaying those parts of AEM are already deprecated etc. And this is just one example of hundreds, that you would need to find a solution for.
It is not worth the effort.
You probably need to go "all-in" with S3 or leave it as is. Not sure what the reasoning is behind this drive to only use S3 "partially" for videos instead of all assets. Videos are probably already the largest assets you have, so it can't be cost. We run pure asset installations with S3 datastore that have 20TB-60TB of data which is totally fine.