Technologies for File Sharing

Question

We presently have a social networking kind of platform. We are next working on file sharing feature, wherein the user should be able to upload and share files(pdf,ppt,docs,images,zip) with friends and groups.

Which specific technologies we should look out for? We are not looking for storage providers like Dropbox, Amazon s3 as answer. We want some advice for efficient storage technologies. We have to store attributes of files like author, with whom the file is shared, edit rights, download rights etc.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

The answer depends on your specific requirements. In general, you should look for a provider that offers high availability (e.g. no single point of failure), high durability (once something is written, it stays written), and high performance (low latency, high throughput). In addition, you may want certain security features but the specifics are, again, a function of your needs. You noted the ability to specify sharing attributes so you'll want a provider that has a high degree of flexibility and control in terms of specifying access permissions. To store related data, like authorship, you'll want the ability to store and retrieve arbitrary meta data associated with the storage object. Finally, while you stated you don't want a specific provider recommendation, I will nonetheless add that Google Cloud Storage is an excellent choice because it provides all of the above functionality and more (full disclosure: I work on Google's cloud products).