Chapter 6. Patterns for Uploading Data

Most system administrators and developers are very familiar with data being uploaded to servers. From HTTP servers (with upload forms) to FTP servers, it is common to come across variations in how to handle the upload as well as the data. For developers, the issue is where to store the data and how to access the interface. Common examples would be using REST to proxy the file to another system or perhaps just writing it into the file system.

From the system administrators' perspective, the questions go a little deeper. If the files will be stored on the filesystem, how will it be able to scale across multiple instances? If it is going to interact with another system, are the system administrators responsible for that instance as well? Were any dependencies introduced, such as database tables or rows? These questions almost come back full-circle to previous patterns and issues such as high availability and redundancy.

We have previously...