I am currently looking into solutions for geographically distributing an FTP sol
ID: 660226 • Letter: I
Question
I am currently looking into solutions for geographically distributing an FTP solution. Here is the use case:
The company I work for has a software product that can produce very large log files which could range from 1 to 10 GB. A customer could zip up multiple files into a single file creating a much larger zip file (could be 20+ GB). We currently have a single FTP server located in our data center. Customers could be anywhere in the world (Asia/Pacific, Europe, Africa, etc.). Due to geographic distances, some of these log file uploads could take a substantial amount of time with the network latency.
What we would like to do is spin up an FTP server on a cloud based Infrastructure as a Service platform (Azure, AWS, etc.) and create instances in multiple geographic regions. A customer would then connect to a single host name and the cloud provider would then route the customer behind the scenes to the nearest cloud data center based on their geographic location.
My question then, is if any such off the shelf software exists that can support a geographically distributed FTP deployment that would allow a user to access via a single host name or entry point, while also keeping things such as users and groups synchronized across each of the different regions.
Explanation / Answer
You can do this with AWS if you use EC2 to host your FTP servers and Route 53 for DNS by taking advantage of the Route 53 DNS feature called "Latency Resource Record Sets"
Links:
Technical documentation
AWS blog post
It would be cool if you could do with this S3 and therefore save money by not having to run EC2 servers but I havent come across that as an option yet. You could bake in some logic into your log sender script to see which S3 region is closest/fastest and upload to a bucket in that region.
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