Does AWS Appstream handle local files uploads?

Question

I am scoping whether to move my app to AWS Appstream. I scoured thru the AWS Appstream Developer guide online documentation but there was no specific mention on this.

My app the would reside on the host requires the user to read from the local PC Directory for some files. Also my app would need to export some output files to the User's local directory. In short, the usual user experience of Browse and select of files etc. From reading the docs, this sort of function should probably reside in the SDK Client. However, the documentation seems to focus on the STX protocol handshaking and how to code the client and host to that API. Says nothing about file I/O. As a comparison, in Microsoft's RDP, this is provided. Not sure about the AWS Client SDK.

Answer 1

You won't be able to read/write directly to the end-user's computer. However, AppStream mounts X: and gives you the ability to upload and download files from there, though that process is manual from the end-user's point of view. If you're requiring the user to upload or download multiple files, maybe you should require a .zip or another container or compressed format.

Answer 2

You can enable Home Folder, that is a simple S3 Bucket mapped to a local drive.

The format of this "shared folder" has this pattern:

bucket-name/user/custom/user-id-SHA-256-hash/

Where bucket-name is in the format shown in Amazon S3 Bucket Storage and user-id-SHA-256-hash is the user-specific folder name created using a lower case SHA-256 hash hexadecimal string generated from the UserId value passed to the CreateStreamingURL API operation or create-streaming-url command. For more information, see CreateStreamingURL in the Amazon AppStream 2.0 API Reference and create-streaming-url in the AWS CLI Command Reference.

Basically, you could access S3 via API and put anything there for a specific user, following this pattern to know where to store it.

More info: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appstream2/latest/developerguide/home-folders-admin.html#home-folders-admin-folders