Plan of action
We are going to store the metadata for our songs collection on SimpleDB and also store the corresponding MP3 files on S3. The following figure shows what we are going to accomplish:
In order to accomplish this, here is the sequence of steps we need to take:
1. Create a bucket in S3 for storing our music files.
2. Create additional metadata that we will need for the files and store the metadata in our songs domain.
3. Save the actual MP3 file to S3.
Creating an S3 bucket
Each S3 bucket has a name associated with it. Please keep in mind that the name of the bucket needs to be unique not just for your AWS account, but across all accounts in S3. This sometimes makes creating a bucket name challenging!
Note
You must of course be signed up to use Amazon S3 before trying out the code samples in this chapter. We examined in detail how to signup for Amazon's Web Services in Chapter 2, Getting Started with SimpleDB. Please review the chapter if you need help with the sign up process.