3 Steps to Integrate SharePoint with Amazon S3 to create Enterprise File Storage Solution

Introduction

Today corporate IT is trying to embrace the influx of cloud storage brought on by the adoption of the cloud. Amazon S3 is the highest deployed cloud storage solution in the world. It is used in many small and large companies throughout the world.

SharePoint developers are aware that SharePoint stores data on their content database and hence SQL Server performance may decrease due to heavy data existence on SQL Server. AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) provides integration with SharePoint using the AWS SDK.

How to use AWS SDK and SharePoint amidst customized development:

Using customized development on AWS SDK and SharePoint, we can easily store SharePoint documents on AWS S3 bucket instead of SharePoint library and return one unique key. A key is a unique identifier for an object within a bucket. Every object in a bucket has exactly one key.

Once the document is stored on AWS S3 then the key is returned and that key is saved in SharePoint list to retrieve the document from AWS S3. It will save your SharePoint Content Database space and increase your SQL Server performance. In case if SharePoint server is crashed then all stored documents on AWS S3 would remain safe and you can access those using AWS cloudberry tool.

You need Amazon S3 and SharePoint to work together, but the native integration either.
a) Doesn’t exist or
 b) Doesn’t do what you want.

Integrating SharePoint with AWS S3:

Before we start integrating SharePoint with AWS let’s have glance on understanding AWS S3 and SharePoint

About Amazon S3:

Amazon Simple Storage Service is a fully redundant data storage system. It makes it easy to store and retrieve any amount of data, anytime, from anywhere.

AWS S3 (Simple storage service) is to provide data storage infrastructure offered by Amazon and is used to store and retrieve any amount of object at any time. Most important unit in AWS S3 is the bucket and is called a logical unit of storage which is used to store objects.

Learn More with DEV IT on AWS S3 here:http://blog.devitpl.com/detailed-insights-to-amazon-web-services-aws/

About SharePoint

SharePoint is the business collaboration software that helps simplify content management, search, and business intelligence. It also has a strong component around sharing for intranet and internet sites.

Why AWS S3?

Mainly agenda to introducing AWS S3 is to store your application objects directly on AWS S3 Cloud instead of your application server. It will help to save your application server space for better performance.

3 Steps to Integrate SharePoint with AWS S3

Note: before we start writing the process, you need to have AWS S3 instance, AWS Secrete key, and AWS Access Key Id.

We can do operation on AWS S3 instance in two ways as mentioned below:

• Using AWS cloudberry Application
• Using AWS SDK

Here we will only see the use of AWS SDK in SharePoint Solution as mentioned in the below steps:

Step1: Install AWS SDK from below link and install:

http://aws.amazon.com/sdkfornet.

To use the AWS SDK for .NET, you must have the following installed.

• (Required) Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 or later
• (Required) Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 or later
• (Required) The AWS SDK for .NET
• (Recommended) AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio, a plugin that provides a user interface for managing your AWS resources from Visual Studio, and includes the AWS SDK for .NET. For more information, see Using the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio.

For Further information, Click Here.

Step 2: Register AWS S3 profile in SharePoint web config file:

Inside “<appSettings>” tag, add following key:
<add key=”AWSProfileName” value=”Amazon” />
<add key=”AWSRegion” value=”us-west-2″ />
In above keys, provide value in “AWSProfileName” and “AWSRegion”.

Step3: Open Visual Studio 2012 OR higher and create new SharePoint project to implement AWS S3 operation:

Note: To use AWS SDK classes in SharePoint, need to add following DLL:

1. AWSSDK.Core
2. AWSSDK.EC2
3. AWSSDK.S3
4. AWSSDK.SimpleDB

• Add Object in AWS S3 Bucket using SharePoint Solution:

• Add Object in sub directory which is created under AWS bucket:

• Get Object from AWS bucket:

• Delete Object from AWS bucket:

Conclusion

 In this blog, we commissioned on how to integrate AWS S3 as an enterprise file storage solution for SharePoint.

 Integrating AWS S3 as an enterprise file storage solution is a cloud application scenario that makes your files securely available from any platform. With secure and highly reliable AWS ecosystem your data is very less likely to breach. When you integrate this solution with your current infrastructure you get a better managed cloud, low recurring costs and pay as you go functionalities.

Learn more with us on how to integrate S3 with SharePoint for different versions and APIs.