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While playing around with Amazon AWS for a little while last year and running a number of instances on the cloud I didn’t pay much attention to their file storage offering, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) for storing and distributing files on the cloud. All that changed recently when I came across an issue with Google App Engine and a third party library I was using.

The issue was that GAE has a file limitation for applications deployed to the platform of 3,000 files. The third party library being used was Smart GWT and after the GWT compilation step there was much more than 3,000 files in the web application causing the application deployment to fail. Unfortunately there’s no way around this on GAE except to host the files elsewhere, with Amazon S3 being the obvious candidate.

I had been using Maven for build and deployment and now needed to integrate deployment to S3 into the same build process and wanted to share how this was done in this post. The S3 service provides a straightforward ReST based API to manage deployments and there are a growing number of tools available providing a layer of functionality on top of the service. One need only search for “amazon s3 deployment tools” on Google to see the vast number available as browser plugins, windows explorer extensions and command line utilities.

For me, I came across an excellent suite of utilities called JetS3t that can be used to manage your S3 deployments …  (more…)