Amazon S3 as Append Only Datastore

As a hack, when I need an append-only datastore with no authentication or validation, I use Amazon S3. S3 is usually a read-only service from the unauthenticated web client's point of view, but if you enable access logging to a bucket you get full-query-parameter URLs recorded in a text file for GETs that can come from a form's action or via XHR.

There aren't a lot of internet-safe append-only datastores out there. All my favorite noSQL solutions divide permissions into read and/or write, where write includes delete. SQL databases let you grant an account insert without update or delete, but still none suggest letting them listen on a port that's open to the world.

This is a bummer because there are plenty of use cases when you want unauthenticated client-side code to add entries to a datastore, but not read or modify them: analytics gathering, polls, guest books, etc. Instead you end up with a bit of server side code that does little more than relay the insert to the datastore using over-privileged authentication credentials that you couldn't put in the client.

To play with this, first, create a file named vote.json in a bucket with contents like {"recorded": true}, make it world readable, set Cache-Control to max-age=0,no-cache and Content-Type to application/json. Now when a browser does a GET to that file's https URL, which looks like a real API endpoint, there's a record in the bucket's log that looks something like:

aaceee29e646cc912a0c2052aaceee29e646cc912a0c2052aaceee29e646cc91
bucketname [31/Jan/2013:18:37:13 +0000] 96.126.104.189
- 289335FAF3AD11B1 REST.GET.OBJECT vote.json "GET
  /bucketname/vote.json?arg=val&arg2=val2 HTTP/1.1" 200 - 12 12
9 8 "-" "lwp-request/6.03 libwww-perl/6.03" -

The full format is described by Amazon, but with client IP and user agent you have enough data for basic ballot box stuffing detection, and you can parse and tally the query arguments with two lines of your favorite scripting language.

This scheme is especially great for analytics gathering because and one never has to worry about full log on disks, load balancers, backed up queues, or unresponsive data collection servers. When you're ready to process the data it's already on S3 near EC2, AWS Data Pipeline or Elastic MapReduce. Plus, S3 has better uptime than anything else Amazon offers, so even if your app is down you're probably recording the failed usage attempts.

Published: Feb 3, 2013, 3:10:43 PM by Ry4an Brase
Tags: software, ideas-built
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