Media Server: Amazon ECS and S3

[delta37]

Background:

So I have a client whose traffic has gotten big over the past year and my current dedicated server is not enough anymore, specially if they run a promo where thousands of users (1,000 - 1,500) simultaneously access the website to get the latest stuff. The server crawls and sometimes crashes. By the way current version of Presta is 1.6.1.6, looking to upgrade to 1.6.1.13 and not 1.7 since we have too much to customize.

 

Now I know we haven't fully optimized the site but we are working on it already but we also need to upgrade the server as well since we are looking now far into the future where they will definitely grow bigger.

 

So we have decided to get a DB server separately and run multiple EC2 instances under a load balancer so that anytime demand goes up, I wouldn't have to worry about the resources. And finally we are looking to load static content and media from an S3 Bucket.

 

Question:

My questions spawns from this line coming form Prestashop Document "Reminder: you must make it so that these folders are always synchronized: even if you add new products or change your theme, the CDN server must contain the latest version of all these files."

 

Since I will be running an automatic load balancer where it will spawn additional EC2 when demand rises and removes them when demand goes down, is it really important to make the local EC2 folders and the S3 bucket synchronized?

 

Can't I just start uploading/updating images and other static content in the S3 bucket and remove all of these in the local EC2 instance?

 

I think it's kinda impossible to synchronize several instance of EC2 since only 1 instance will be permanently running and the rest will be spawned as the need arises.

 

Thanks!