Alternative to S3

[luisramos0]

We all agree we want to move away from Amazon S3 to store images and backups.
The next step is to decide what provider will we use instead? I see a few providers implement the Amazon S3 APi, so we could make our code generic and use one of these:

Amazon S3 | S3 API and competing services

@Rachel pointed out some alternatives in slack:
Indie’s hoster s3 Fabriquer l’avenir et rester libres | IndieHosters
Scaleway’s s3 : Object Storage | Scaleway
They are EU centered. Scaleway is the cheapest (it’s part of the Iliad company which is the same parent company as Free a big telecom/internet company in France).

This is related to this thread related to servers:

Switch to green hosting when new projects / provisionning?

What hosting provider do we have until know, for the global website and the local instances ? Are they aligned with our values or not ? I’m asking that question as we pointed in the research project and report we are issuing soon that it’s indeed hard to weight the positive environmental impact gained through local food chains and the negative environmental impact of computering (hosting, but also rare earths). And I see more and more websites advertising for the fact that their site is powered…

What do you think?

[apb]

I did a super quick proof of concept on another project using Rails ActiveStorage and Digital Ocean Spaces (which is mentioned in the Wikipedia article) and it was, as advertised, fully compatible with the S3 API. Very easy to set it all up.

They look a bit more expensive than Scaleway though ($0.02/GB compared to Scaleway’s €0.01/GB) and are US-based.

[maikel]

None of the mentioned alternatives seem to be carbon neutral.

Just an idea: we don’t have to use the same service for images and backups.

There are privacy concerns around Amazon (and all providers residing in the US and to an extend in the Five Eyes). That’s an issue with our database backups but not with our images. Backups could also be encrypted to combat this concern. That would be a good idea anyway.

Green hosting is the other point. Backups are quite flexible. The fog gem supports many providers. But we can also just get a hydro-powered VPS and store the backups there via SSH. It will be more expensive though.

Similarly, we could find other solutions for images. We can store them locally but serve them through a cookie-less subdomain, for example. Paperclip is now deprecated and has been replaced by ActiveStorage. I don’t know which services are supported but I reckon that it wouldn’t be difficult to implement our own if needed. But Google Cloud is already supported and a lot greener than AWS.

[luisramos0]

Great feedback!

@maikel

None of the mentioned alternatives seem to be carbon neutral.

Are there any carbon neutral options Maikel?

I agree, these are 2 separate challenges: backups and images. And they can have completely different solutions.

The current alternative to S3 for both images and backups, storing things locally, are not god enough, are they? I am particularly worried about local backups, if we lose access to the server for some reason we lose ALL data and ALL backups.

Maybe I’d say having images stored on the server is less worrying and the real problem are the local backups. Maybe I’d make this our first problem, make the fog gem work with some other eco-friendly provider. Should be an easy task I think.