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AWS S3 integration


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Just checking if anybody in the Community know bit more about AWS S3 - External file storage integration. Any guidance or insight how to select the best S3 storage for Medium/M Resource level of Acumatica, what specs we may be looking for? And what pitfalls to avoid. 

I did check with Acumatica support and there was not much help either, so asking the community if anybody has any insight on this topic.

Thanks

 

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Best answer by hsarjapur 27 March 2022, 15:44

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Hi @hsarjapur 

Did you check following documentation? Let me know the details missing here, I can reach out to our saas admin team.

https://help.acumatica.com/(W(1))/Help?ScreenId=ShowWiki&pageid=54ef574c-0adf-48a0-b5be-d3438a6e5400

 

Regards,

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Hi Vijay,

Thanks for the update, that was not the information I was looking for, I figured out that there are different tiers one can opt for in S3 based on the method of storage and usage.

The best that works is S3 Intelligent - Tiering* which provides Acumatica customers to get started and have the system intelligent store data, if we are storing the data for longer period then Glacier and frequent access or faster retrieval etc. Since Acumatica just dumps the files and doesn’t categorize the best to go for is S3 Intelligent tier for now.
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=4
 

Hope this helps others who are looking to switch to S3 storage. 

Thanks
Harsha 

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Short video describing pro’s/con’s of database versus file system storage plus basic setup and configuration: https://youtu.be/cE22UNDoeSo

 

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Hey @hsarjapur,

I haven’t used this with a Production environment of Acumatica yet, but I’ve been using Amazon S3 for my AUGForums.com website for years and it works great.

You can’t beat the price. It partially depends on how much bandwidth you utilize, but, as far as total file storage goes, I'm using about 145GB of space and my bill last month was only about $3.00.

I don't remember picking a “type” of S3 storage, but, as far as I know, I’m simply using S3 Standard as listed on the top of the screenshot below.

I think the main reason to look at the other options would be for things like database backups or other infrequently accessed files.

For file attachments in Acumatica, I would think that S3 Standard would be the best option because of the “frequently accessed” nature of file attachments.

 

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We have used this for years. At one point, the Acumatica team began disabling the functionality because they thought people weren’t using it or something. I pushed back and I guess they decided to continue allowing it.

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@darylbowman I think that one of the reasons why they might have disabled it by default in SaaS environments was because of Test environments. When you copy a Production Tenant to a Test Tenant, the Amazon S3 links remain the same. So, if you delete a document in a Test environment, it would get deleted in Production as well. How do you handle this scenario?

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@darylbowman I think that one of the reasons why they might have disabled it by default in SaaS environments was because of Test environments. When you copy a Production Tenant to a Test Tenant, the Amazon S3 links remain the same. So, if you delete a document in a Test environment, it would get deleted in Production as well. How do you handle this scenario?

Very manually 😂

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@darylbowman Is it just a matter of letting everyone know not to delete documents in Test?

Then, whatever documents you create in Test get mingled with Production documents in the Amazon S3 folder, but who cares?

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@TimRodman 

Well, I was actually thinking of separate Tenants. We have had a situation where we moved a Tenant from a different instance and had to mess with Tenant IDs so that the right folders got connected in AWS.

For the specific question you’re asking, no one really uses testing data aside from me and not usually in regards to files. So while there’s not a policy in place, it’s never been an issue.

 

I am actually going to push back on this though, because I’m pretty sure Acumatica creates folders in AWS for different Tenants. If the test Tenant is in the same instance, it couldn’t have the same Tenant ID and therefore shouldn’t connect to the same place. Am I thinking incorrectly?

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@darylbowman Ah, interesting, I didn’t realize that. Maybe then it’s only an issue when restoring a backup to another Acumatica Instance.

It’s good to know though that you’ve been using it for years without any major issues. Would you mind sharing the size of your Amazon S3 Bucket?

Click the Metrics button on the top to see the size of the bucket:

 

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591 GB

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@TimRodman 

I was wrong. It’s Company IDs that it creates. So it wouldn’t protect against that. It would be nice if they also used Tenant IDs.

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I had a conversation with @darylbowman on my Acumatica Podcast about how he's using Acumatica with Amazon S3. Here's the episode if you're interested:

https://www.augforums.com/episode101

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Does anyone backup the S3 bucket that they use as the external file storage?

With Saas, Acumtica says they backup the database. See here

When you delete a file it removes it from the bucket, so is there even a point? 

 

@TimRodman Thanks for the podcast!

@darylbowman Thanks for sharing!

 

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