Anyone using the clouds to hold their RETS images.. Need more space any thoughts?

Question

Is anyone using a cloud to provide access to their RETS MLS images so that the pubic can access at will w/o password? I currently have the images storing on my server for direct public access through my website, however need lots more space and just not sure about how to get the images to the web and make them available to view through my website. I download them each 15 min from the RETS server and store them on my server. So, what I need is the procedure to convert this storage to a cloud, knowing there may be some password requirements to access the cloud.

Answer 1

We are using Azure Storage (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/) to cache all of the images for one of our products. We sort of "lazy load" the images in there. If a request is made for an image, we pull it from our cloud storage (where the image is made public) and stream it from there much faster than over RETS media request. If we ever have to make an on demand request from a RETS server for the image we immediately cache it. We'll also pre-fetch images for slower MLS's. Images have been a severe performance impact on working with RETS systems for us.

This also lets us do some cool stuff like resizing the image on the fly pretty quickly too for our customers so they don't have to waste bandwidth downloading full size images if that's not what they want.

Here is a link to our open source SDK on how our customers end up using the image service. https://github.com/timitek/getrets-php-sdk#imageurl

Answer 2

Amazon S3 Buckets is a better solution. We have around 18 TB of data in it. And also like you said " each image needs it own directory", we have millions of directories for 400+ MLSs.

Everything works fine and there is no delay as well. Its scalable too.

Note: We are getting binary raw data for MLS images and that we are directly writing to S3 and making the image urls.